Hints for Lovers

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Hints for Lovers

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Title: Hints for Lovers
Author: Arnold Haultain
Release Date: December 4, 2004 [EBook #14255]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HINTS FOR
LOVERS ***

Produced by Katherine for Chrissy, Dorcas, and Bryan

HINTS FOR LOVERS
by Arnold Haultain

Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company : New York
310 The Riverside Press Cambridge, Massachusetts U.S.A.

Copyright, 1909, by Theodore Arnold Haultain All Rights Reserved
Entered at Stationers' Hall

This Edition is limited to five hundred and forty numbered copies of
which this is number 245

To Emma Mellicent Audrey

PHAIDRA: ti touth o dae legousin anthropous eran TROPHOS:
aediston, o pai, tauton a lgeinon th ama -Euripides

Table of Contents
I. On Girls II. On Men III. On Women IV. On Love V. On Lovers VI.
On Making Love VII. On Beauty VIII. On Courtship IX. On Men and
Women X. On Jealousy XI. On Kisses and Kissing XII. On
Engagements and Being Engaged XIII. On Marriage and Married Life
XIV. On This Human Heart

PLEA: CONFESSION AND AVOIDANCE
". . . aphorism are seldom couched in such terms, that they should be
taken as they sound precisely, or according to the widest extent of
signification; but do commonly need exposition, and admit exception:

otherwise frequently they would not only clash with reason and
experience, but interfere, thwart, and supplant one another." --Issac
Barrow
"The very essence of an aphorism is that slight exaggeration which
makes it more biting whilst less rigidly accurate." --Leslie Stephen

I. On Girls
"A Pearl, A Girl." -Browning
There are of course, girls and girls; yet at heart they are pretty much
alike. In age, naturally, they differ wildly. But this is a thorny subject.
Suffice it to say that all men love all girls-the maid of sweet sixteen
equally with the maid of untold age.
* * *
There is something exasperatingly something-or-otherish about girls.
And they know it--which makes them more something-or-otherish
still:--there is no other word for it.
* * *
A girl is a complicated thing. It is made up of clothes, smiles, a
pompadour, things of which space and prudence forbid the enumeration
here. These things by themselves do not constitute a girl which is
obvious; nor is any one girl without these things which is not too
obvious. Where the things end and the girl begins many men have tried
to find out.
Many girls would like to be men--except on occasions. At least so they
say, but perhaps this is just a part of their something-or-otherishness.
Why they should want to be men, men cannot conceive. Men pale
before them, grow hot and cold before them, run before them (and after
them), swear by them (and at them), and a bit of a chit of a thing in
short skirts and lisle-thread stockings will twist able-bodied males

round her little finger.
It is an open secret that girls are fonder of men than they are of one
another--which is very lucky for the men.
Girls differ; and the same girl is different at different times. When she
is by herself, she is one thing. When she is with other girls she is
another thing. When she is with a lot of men, she is a third sort of thing.
When she is with a man. . . But this baffled even Agur the son of Jakeh.
As a rule, a man prefers a girl by herself. This is natural. And yet is said
that you cannot have too much of a good thing. If this were true, a bevy
of girls would be the height of happiness. Yet some men would sooner
face the bulls of Bashan.
Some foolish men--probably poets--have sought for and asserted the
existence of the ideal girl. This is sheer nonsense: there is no such thing.
And if there were, she could not compare with the real girl, the girl of
flesh and blood--which (as some one ought to have said) are excellent
things in woman.
Other men, equally foolish, have regarded girls as playthings. I wish
these men had tried to play with them. They would have found that
they were playing with fire and brimstone. Yet the veriest spit-fire can
be wondrous sweet.
Sweet? Yes. On the whole a girl is the sweetest thing known or
knowable. On the