He felt the little irony of the thing,
and yet was quite unable to resist the comparison.
And then, too, she had referred again to her sin of peculation. A woman
enjoys confessions from a man. A man's sins are mostly vague, indefinite
things to a woman, a shadowy background which brings out the man in a
beautiful attitude of repentance; but when a woman confesses, the man
sees all her past as a close-up with full lighting. He has an intimate
acquaintance with just what she's talking about, and the woman herself
grows shadowy and unreal. Men have too many blots not to demand
whiteness in women. By striking some such average, nature keeps the race
a going moral concern.
So Peter, as he stood looking down on the woman who was asking him to
marry her, was filled with as unhappy and as impersonal a tenderness as
a born brother. He recalled the thoughts which had come to him when he
saw Cissie passing his window. She was not the sort of woman he wanted
to marry; she was not his ideal. He cast about in his head for some
gentle way of putting her off, so that he would not hurt her any
further, if such an easement were possible.
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