Hints for Lovers | Page 5

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 please a woman is to let her do what she pleases.
* * *
Woman is born to acting as the sparks fly upward. And
What a woman really is, nobody knows, least of all herself. To see a woman as she really is, one must see her with her babe. For
It is curious, but it is true, that not even before the passionate and accepted lover to whom she has utterly devoted herself can a woman bare her heart as can she to her babe. Perhaps we may go so far as to say that
Motherhood always partially eclipses wife-hood:
When the child comes, the man stands aside. For
It is not within the capability of man to evoke or to develop the totality of woman. There are feminine potentialities he is powerless to awake. There is a portion of womanliness always hidden from him. To her babe alone she opens the innermost recesses of her soul. For him she wears no masks, affect no accent, plays no part. Even her features take on a different and unique expression before