All sorts of ideas were jumbled up in me and never a lucid
explanation. But it was evident to me that the world regarded Shelley,
for example, as a very heroic as well as beautiful person; and that
to defy convention and succumb magnificently to passion was the proper
thing to do to gain the respect and affection of all decent people.
And the make-up of Marion's mind in the matter was an equally irrational
affair. Her training had been one, not simply of silences, but
suppressions. An enormous force of suggestion had so shaped her that
the intense natural fastidiousness of girlhood had developed into
an absolute perversion of instinct. For all that is cardinal in this
essential business of life she had one inseparable epithet--"horrid."
Without any such training she would have been a shy lover, but now she
was an impossible one. For the rest she had derived, I suppose, partly
from the sort of fiction she got from the Public Library, and partly
from the workroom talk at Smithie's. So far as the former origin went,
she had an idea of love as a state of worship and service on the part of
the man and of condescension on the part of the woman.
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