I came across this passage reading Bennett's "The Old Wives' Tale" which I thought was really fascinating and then yesterday I saw a lengthy Twitter thread written by a woman, complaining about how male pedestrians behave. It was just far too serendipitous to ignore. Enjoy.
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She was obliged to walk slowly, because Gerald walked slowly. A beautiful woman, or any woman not positively hag-like or venerable, who walks slowly in the streets of Paris becomes at once the cause of inconvenient desires, as representing the main objective on earth, always transcending in importance politics and affairs. Just as a true patriotic Englishman cannot be too busy to run after a fox, so a Frenchman is always ready to forsake all in order to follow a woman whom he has never before set eyes on. Many men thought twice about her, with her Romantic Saxon mystery of temperament, and her Parisian clothes; but all refrained from affronting her, not in the least out of respect for the gloom in her face, but from an expert conviction that those rapt eyes were were fixed immovably on another male. She walked unscathed amid the frothing hounds as though protected by a spell. The Old Wive's Tale