Ingenue

The thing you have to understand about her is that everything is simultaneously sincere and calculated. We’ve been told that this is impossible, we’ve been indoctrinated with the opposition of sincerity and calculation. But I suspect this is merely another inheritance, an arbitrary and problematic philosophical monstrosity.

Here is a little story, so that you can understand her:

300 years ago, there was a girl living in a village in northwestern Europe. She found her power in the toss of the hair, in the little smile and the flashing eyes. In back rooms and the village haylofts she bedded farmhands and tinkers and soldiers and bandits. Only the bandits understood her. When she became pregnant she picked for herself from among her lovers a sweet, hardworking farm holder and told him he was the father. And they were married for thirty-two years, until he died in his farthest field. She was a good wife, a loving wife. But the farmer was always mildly plagued with guilt for, he thought, stealing her youth and innocence. She understood this guilt, kept it alive, tended to it delicately as if it were an orchid, because she enjoyed the tenderness that it caused him to show her.

(from Wikipedia, “Typically, the Ingenue is beautiful, gentle, sweet, virginal, and often naïve, in mental or emotional danger, or even physical danger, usually a target of The Cad; whom she may have mistaken for The Hero…The Vamp is often a foil for the ingenue…”)