"
The subject seemed to be making both uncomfortable; they
dropped it.
Women are bred to attach enormous importance to their physical
selves--so much so that many women have no other sense of
self-respect, and regard themselves as possessing the entirety
of virtue if they have chastity or can pretend to have it.
The life Susan had led upsets all this and forces a woman
either utterly to despise herself, even as she is despised of
men, or to discard the sex measure of feminine self-respect as
ridiculously inadequate, and to seek some other measure.
Susan had sought this other measure, and had found it. She
was, therefore, not a little surprised to find--after Freddie
had been back three or four days--that he was arousing in her
the same sensations which a strange man intimately about would
have aroused in her in the long past girlhood of innocence.
It was not physical repulsion; it was not a sense of
immorality. It was a kind of shyness, a feeling of violated
modesty. She felt herself blushing if he came into the room
when she was dressing. As soon as she awakened in the morning
she sprang from bed beside him and hastened into her
dressing-room and closed the door, resisting an impulse to
lock it. Apparently the feeling of physical modesty which she
had thought dead, killed to the last root, was not dead, was
once more stirring toward life.
"What are you blushing about?" asked he, when she, passing
through the bedroom, came suddenly upon him, very scantily dressed.
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