Hints for Lovers | Page 2

6 whole of this terrestrial sphere Nature has produced
nothing more adorable than the high-spirited high-bred girl.--Of this
she is quite aware--to our cost (I speak as a man). The consequence is,
her price has gone up, and man has to pay high and pay all sorts of
things--ices, sweets, champagne, drives, church-goings, and sometimes
spot-cash.
Men are always wishing they knew all about girls. It is a precious good
thing that they don't.--Not that this is in any way disparaging to the
girls. The fact is

A girl is an infinite puzzle, and it is this puzzle, that, among other
things, tickles the men, and rouses their curiosity.
What a man doesn't know about a girl would fill a Saratoga trunk; what
her does know about her would go into her work-box.
* * *
The littlest girl is a little women. No boy knows this--and precious few
grown up men. Thus
Many a grown up man plays with a girl, then finds himself in love with
her. As to the girl---
Always the girl knows whether the play is leading: she probably
chooses the game.
* * *
Very late in life does a man learn the truth (and significance) of that
ancient proverb that Kissing goes by Favour. For
The masculine mind is the slave of Law and Justice:
Aphrodite never heard of Law or Justice: she was born at sea. That is to
say,
Few are the men who at some time in their lives have not wondered at
the vagaries of girlish complaisance: the foolish, the ne'er-do-well, the
bully, the careless, the cruel,--it is to these often that a girls' caress is
given. And,
Curiously enough, that is, curiously enough as it seems to purblind
law-loving man,--should the favored one be openly convicted, that
alters not one whit his statue with the girl; for,
A girl, having given her heart, never recalls it not wholly: she may
regret; she never recoils. In other words,

To the man of her own free lawless choice a girl is always loyal; to
subsequent and subordinate attachments she is dutiful. So,
Even the renegade, if loved by a girl, will be upheld by that girl through
thick and thin--secretly, it may be, for often the girl, nevertheless
devotedly, and only under compulsion will he listen to the detractor: he
may desert her, or, if he sticks to her, he may beat her; no matter: he
holds her heart in the hollow of his hand. But, But,
Few things mystify poor law-abiding man than this, that the central, the
profoundest, the most portentous puzzle of the universe--the weal of
woe of two high-aspiring, much-enduring, youthful human souls,
should be the sport of what seems to him the veriest and merest chance.
* * *
The unconscious search of sweet sixteen is for (in mathematical
language which will not sophisticate her) the integral of love.--Yet
In the short years between sixteen and twenty a girl's love will undergo
rapid and startling developments.
* * *
A girl with lots of brothers has more chances of matrimony than a girl
with none: she knows more of men; especially of their weaknesses and
idiosyncrasies. And
To know the weaknesses and idiosyncrasies of men is perhaps a wife's
chief task; unless it be to put up with them.
* * *
Often enough the freckled and fringrant girl wins over the professional
beauty.
* * *
Sometimes grown-up girls are just as shy as little ones--and for the

same reasons because there is no one who knows how to play with
them.
Girls often play with love as if it were one of the amusements of life;
but a day comes when love proves itself the most sensuous thing on
earth. And
A girl is quick to discover the kind of love that is required of her. As a
rule
Many a girl who has been sore put to it to prove herself whole-hearted.
For of course,
Always every suitor expects whole heartedness. And this every girl
instinctively knows. Indeed,
Is not a half-hearted love, or a half-hearted acceptress of love, a
contradiction in terms?
* * *
A certain measure of the sophisticated or unsophistication of a youthful
damsel may be found in her manner o f receiving the attentions of a
stranger in a station different from her own.
Young women, themselves but rarely unsophisticated, view with a
certain pitying sort of curiosity unsophisticatedness in men. And
A young man's unsophisticatedeness it is a great delight to a woman to
eradicate. Yet
A girl regards with complex emotions the man who has blossomed
under the genial warmth of her rays; the flattery to own powers is
counterbalanced by the evidence of lack of power in him.
* * *
A girl thinks she detects flippancy