Hints for Lovers | Page 3

in seriousness. A woman thinks she
detects seriousness in flippancy.

* * *
What would be conduct decidedly risqué in a city miss, is often
innocent playfulness in a country maid.
* * *
Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, girls play with love as if it
were a doll; very soon after twenty they discover it is a dynamo. This is
why
An early and clandestine engagement often works more havoc than
happiness. For
Either, one of the parties to the concealed compact receives or pays
attention which perturb the other; or, a subsequent and acknowledged
lover looks askance at the previous entanglement. Since even if
A clandestine engagement (as is usually the case) is merely a flirtation
with the emoluments which accompany a promise to marry, those
emoluments are not nice things for a subsequent and avowed lover,
whether masculine or feminine, to think upon. Lastly,
A laxity with regard to the claims of courtship is apt to breed a laxity
with regard to the claims of wedlock. In short,
Flirtations, like clandestine engagements, are an affront to love.
Accordingly
To the engagement-ring should be as attached as much importance as to
the wedding-ring. Indeed,
A difficult and a delicate path it is that a girl has to tread through
life--and often enough a dangerous. Yet with extraordinary deftness she
treads it. She must win her a mate, yet has to pretend that the mate wins
her. She makes believe to be captured, yet has herself to be intent on
the chase. To be wooed and wedded is the law of her being, yet not for
one moment dares she to exhibit too great an alacrity to obey that law;

for she knows instinctively that an easy victory prognosticates a fickle
victor. Is she abundantly endowed with the very attributes that make for
wife-and mother-hood, a strong and swaying passion and an affection
unbounded, she must hold them in leash with exemplary patience; for,
alas! Are they given the rein for a single passing moment, instead of
being accounted unto her for righteousness, they work her ruin. She
must win her one man, and she must win him for life; but she cannot
pick or choose, for she must wait to be asked.
If she make test of many admirers, she is described as a flirt; if,
conscientious and demure, she await her fate, a desirable fate is by no
means assured.
In truth it seems that too often a girl must dissemble--hateful as
dissemblance in men. T'is a hard road indeed that a girl has to travel.
To win her a fellow-farer for life, she must go out of her way to
accommodate so many travelers: and this one is lured by this, and that
one by that, and another by something unnoticed by the throng. But, an
she dissembles one iota too much, her fellow-farers look askance, and
he who eventually joins her for good upbraids her for that by which she
won.
Dissemblance is indeed at once the boon and the bane of a girl: without
it, she thinks to be overlooked (often enough a preposterous
assumption); with it, she is looked upon too much. And always,
Always a girl has to pretend that never did she descend to dissemblance.
--Which, nevertheless, is sometimes absolutely true, for
Just now and then there happens that miracle of miracles, where their
flames up in the man, and their flames up in the maid, in both at once,
unaided and unlooked-for, that divine and supra-mundane spark which
smolders lambent in every youthful breast: when maid and man take
mutual fire at touch of hands and look of eyes,--fire lit at that vestal
altar which knows no source and burns for aye.

II. On Men
"Duskolon esti to thremma anthropus." --Plato
For man, the over-grown boy, life has commonly two, and only two,
sides: work, and play. Happy he who has for a helpmate one who
possesses the faculty of increasing a zeal for the first and of adding a
zest to the second. Wherein, O woman, thou mayest happily find the
two-fold secret of thy life-work. For
Man is a greedy animal: he wants all or nothing. And fortunately for
him,
Women tacitly extol man's greed: they will not be shared any more than
they will share.
There is something canine in the masculine nature: like a dog over a
bone, it snarls at the very approach of a rival.
* * *
It is curious, but it is true, that proud man becomes prouder (and--more
curious still--at the same time humbler) when weak woman gives him
something--a look a smile, a locket, her hair, a kiss, herself.
* * *
The greater a man's faith in himself, the greater his mistress hers in him.
And perhaps, the greater his