It distorted,
ever so slightly, his concepts of things. It gave a squint to his
perceptions, and very often, when the sex feminine was concerned,
determined his classifications. He prided himself on his largeness
when he granted that there were three kinds of women. His mother had
only admitted two. But he had outgrown her. It was incontestable that
there were three kinds,--the good, the bad, and the partly good and
partly bad. That the last usually went bad, he believed firmly. In
its very nature such a condition could not be permanent. It was the
intermediary stage, marking the passage from high to low, from best to
worst.
All of which might have been true, even as he saw it; but with
definitions for premises, conclusions cannot fail to be dogmatic. What
was good and bad? There it was. That was where his mother whispered
with dead lips to him. Nor alone his mother, but divers conventional
generations, even back to the sturdy ancestor who first uplifted from
the soil and looked down. For Vance Corliss was many times removed
from the red earth, and, though he did not know it, there was a clamor
within him for a return lest he perish.
Not that he pigeon-holed Frona according to his inherited definitions.
He refused to classify her at all. He did not dare. He preferred to
pass judgment later, when he had gathered more data.
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