The Heart's Kingdom

"You don't expect me to discuss our garden with an ignorant bucolic Methodist minister, who probably doesn't know a honeysuckle from a jimson weed, do you?" I said this with rising rage, then faltered -- for I was interrupted by his appearance in the open door. I am a woman who has very decided tastes about the biological man. I know just how I want the creature to look, and I haven't much interest in one that isn't one of my preferred kind. I am very tall and broad and deep-bosomed and vivid and high colored, and altogether very much like one of the most vigorous of Sorolla's paintings -- and that is the probable pathological reason I have always preferred an evolved Whistler masculine nocturne that retreats to the limits of my comprehension and then beckons me to follow! All other men I have grouped beyond the border of my feminine nature, and waste no thought upon them . . . But it was a shock to come face to face with a type of man I had never before met. The enemy was astonishingly large and lithe, and distinctly resembled one of the big gold-colored lions that live in the wilds . . .