The Spinster Book | Page 8

rightful property. It does not seem to occur to her that
someone else will lure him away from her with even more ease. Each
successive luring makes defection simpler for a man. Practice tends
towards perfection in most things; perhaps it is the single exception,
love, which proves the rule.
Three delusions among women are widespread and painful. Marriage is
currently supposed to reform a man, a rejected lover is heartbroken for
life, and, if "the other woman" were only out of the way, he would
come back. Love sometimes reforms a man, but marriage does not. The
rejected lover suffers for a brief period,--feminine philosophers
variously estimate it, but a week is a generous average,--and he who
will not come in spite of "the other woman" is not worth having at all.
[Sidenote: "Not Things, but Men"]
Emerson says: "The things which are really for thee gravitate to thee."
One is tempted to add the World's Congress motto--"Not things, but
men."
There is no virtue in women which men cultivate so assiduously as
forgiveness. They make one think that it is very pretty and charming to
forgive. It is not hygienic, however, for the woman who forgives easily
has a great deal of it to do. When pardon is to be had for the asking,
there are frequent causes for its giving. This, of course, applies to the
interesting period before marriage.
[Sidenote: Post-Nuptial Sins]
Post-nuptial sins are atoned for with gifts; not more than once in a
whole marriage with the simple, manly words, "Forgive me, dear, I was
wrong." It injures a man's conceit vitally to admit he has made a
mistake. This is gracious and knightly in the lover, but a married man,
the head of a family, must be careful to maintain his position.
Cases of reformation by marriage are few and far between, and men
more often die of wounded conceit than broken hearts. "Men have died
and worms have eaten them, but not for love," save on the stage and in

the stories women cry over.
[Sidenote: "The Other Woman"]
"The other woman" is the chief bugbear of life. On desert islands and in
a very few delightful books, her baneful presence is not. The girl a man
loves with all his heart can see a long line of ghostly ancestors, and
requires no opera-glass to discern through the mists of the future a
procession of possible posterity. It is for this reason that men's ears are
tried with the eternal, unchanging: "Am I the only woman you ever
loved?" and "Will you always love me?"
The woman who finally acquires legal possession of a man is haunted
by the shadowy predecessors. If he is unwary enough to let her know
another girl has refused him, she develops a violent hatred for this
inoffensive maiden. Is it because the cruel creature has given pain to
her lord? His gods are not her gods--if he has adored another woman.
These two are mutually "other women," and the second one has the best
of it, for there is no thorn in feminine flesh like the rejected lover who
finds consolation elsewhere. It may be exceedingly pleasant to be a
man's first love, but she is wise beyond books who chooses to be his
last, and it is foolish to spend mental effort upon old flames, rather than
in watching for new ones, for Cæsar himself is not more utterly dead
than a man's dead love.
Women are commonly supposed to worry about their age, but Father
Time is a trouble to men also. The girl of twenty thinks it absurd for
women to be concerned about the matter, but the hour eventually
comes when she regards the subject with reverence akin to awe. There
is only one terror in it--the dreadful nines.
[Sidenote: Scylla and Charybdis]
"Twenty-nine!" Might she not as well be thirty? There is little choice
between Scylla and Charybdis. Twenty-nine is the hour of reckoning
for every woman, married, engaged, or unattached.

The married woman felicitates herself greatly, unless a tall daughter of
nine or ten walks abroad at her side. The engaged girl is safe--she
rejoices in the last hours of her lingering girlhood and hems table linen
with more resignation. The unattached girl has a strange interest in
creams and hair tonics, and usually betakes herself to the cloister of the
university for special courses, since azure hosiery does not detract from
woman's charm in the eyes of the faculty.
Men do not often know their ages accurately till after thirty. The
gladsome heyday of youth takes no note of the annual milestones. But
after thirty, ah me! "Yes," a man will say sometimes, "I am thirty-one,
but the fellows tell me I don't look a day over twenty-nine." Scylla and
Charybdis