Hints for Lovers | Page 3

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 mistress her faith in a man, the greater his in himself. For
A woman's faith in a man works wonders.
* * *
A man to whom a woman cannot look up, she cannot love. Yet,
It is marvelous how a woman contrives to find something to look up to in a man.
* * *
Many men forget the artistic tendency of the feminine temperament, a tendency which shows itself in many ways--their love of pretty things, of pretty ways, and of pretty words. From which three alone we may deduce the rule that
When with the woman he admires and whose admiration he seeks, a man cannot be