Hints for Lovers | Page 5

innervates; it exhaults. Under its spell, reason
is flung to the winds, and matters of great mundane moment are trivial
and of no account: for it bewilders the wit and snatches the judgment of
sane and rational men. It is most powerful in youth; it is most powerful
upon youth; yet some retain it till far on in years, and no age but feels
its sway:--a veiled and mysterious force; sometimes daemonical, often
divine: at once the delight and the despair of man. After all,

The man who declares he understands women, declares his folly. For,
If woman were not such a mystery, she would not be such an attraction.
For again,
What is known is ignored. (But woman need have no cause for
apprehension.) Besides,
Men may be classified; women never. This is why
Generalizing in the case of women is useless; since
Woman is a species of which every woman is a variety. And every man
must make up his mind to this, that
Every woman is a study in herself. However,
If women were comprehensible to men, men and women would be
friends, not lovers (But the race is safe). The simple fact is that
Womanliness is the supreme attraction, in however fair or however frail
a personality it is embodied. And
The sacred function of all womanhood is to kindle in man the divine
spark by means 30 of the mystic flame that burns ever in the vestal
breast.
* * *
Every true woman's orbit is determined by two forces: Love and Duty.
Which is another way of saying that
Women, like the lark, are true to the kindred points of heaven and home.
But,
It is only when the two foci are coincident and identical that her orbit
becomes the perfect circle and her home becomes her heaven.
* * *

A woman's heart is an unfathomable ocean: nothing ever filled it; no
one ever plumbed it. At the surface are glancing waves, or flying
spume, or, it may be, raging billows; beneath are silent depths invisible
to man. A thousand streams flow into it in vain. Towards varying
coast-lines it bears itself variously; here, placid and content; there,
dashing furious. But none ever stamped his marked upon its brim, and
always it remains the refluent, reluctant sea. Of it man knows only the
waves that break or ripple at his feet. It betrays no 31 secrets; it asks
not to be understood. Storm and calm but stir or still its surface, and
what things it hides forever engulfed no one may learn. Subtle, yet
mighty; an eternal, and entrancing, mystery to man.
A man's heart is the enclosing shore; measurable, impressionable,
definite, and overt; thinking to house that sea, shaping it, over looking
it, and staying and governing its tides. Yet changed by it, crumbling
before it, yielding to it: at once its guardian and its slave. Yet perhaps
The placidest of seas is that which is wholly land-locked.
* * *
Women, apparently, were made for men; men for themselves. Certainly
Men seem to carry out this design of Nature, that they should be
ministered to by women.
* * *
A woman asks a woman questions in order to discover something. She
asks a man questions in order to discover the man.
* * *
he last thing that a woman will risk is her personal appearance. Which
is saying a good deal, for
A woman will risk an interview at an unseasonable hour, but not in an
unseasonable frock.

* * *
Never, never take a woman au pied de la letter.
* * *
Women's rights are: to be loved.
* * *
Women's duties are: to love.
* * *
There is always something sovereign and monarchial about a woman:
like a queen's, her wishes are her commands. And
In matrimony, woman's sovereignty is not abdicated. By no means; it is
only transformed from an absolute into a constitutional monarch : she
acts then by and with the advice of her First Lord. This is the ideal
State.
* * *
Woman's true function, as a citizen, in this world is: to spur men on to
high and noble action. And this, quite unconsciously, she does.
Woman's true function, as a woman, in the world is: to evoke man's
most fervid emotions, and at the same time to keep them at their
highest level. And this she also does--perhaps not quite so
unconsciously.
* * *
They err who call women illogical. Feminine logic is inexorable. But it
proceeds per saltum. It is man who has laboriously to reason step by
step.
* * *

The most wayward woman craves control: To let a woman have her
own way is interpreted by her as indifference. And
The surest way to fail to