Page:Maud Howe - A Newport Aquarelle.djvu/78

 systematic hardening of those qualities in him which reach out instinctively to the feminine side of humanity, are soul hurts, which are not healed when the pain of the deceived love has passed.

His judgment of the whole sex cannot fail to be biassed by his experience of the woman who has most deeply interested him. Thus it is that the coquette, by lowering the whole standard of womanhood in the eyes of man, injures her own sex as well as the other.

The forms of coquetry are infinitely varied, and some of them are much more reprehensible than others. The woman who undertakes conquests simply for the glory of displaying at the wheels of her chariot the captive she holds by the rosy bonds of love, is the commonest type.

As her coquetry is of the most patent kind, its wounds are rarely severe or lasting, and yet there is a certain vulgarity about this spirit of conquest, which makes this type of women dangerous to both men and women.