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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Spinster Book, by Myrtle Reed
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Spinster Book
+
+Author: Myrtle Reed
+
+Release Date: March 29, 2006 [EBook #18071]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SPINSTER BOOK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Susan Skinner and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Spinster Book
+
+By Myrtle Reed
+
+
+G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
+New York and London
+The Knickerbocker Press
+
+1907
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1901
+BY
+MYRTLE REED
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Set up and electrotyped, September, 1901
+
+Reprinted, November, 1901; April, 1902; August, 1902; April, 1903;
+July, 1903; September, 1903; June, 1904; October, 1904; June, 1905;
+September, 1905; March, 1906; September, 1906; November, 1906;
+July, 1907.
+
+
+The Knickerbocker Press, New York
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+BY MYRTLE REED.
+
+    LOVE LETTERS OF A MUSICIAN.
+    LATER LOVE LETTERS OF A MUSICIAN.
+    THE SPINSTER BOOK.
+    LAVENDER AND OLD LACE.
+    PICKABACK SONGS.
+    THE SHADOW OF VICTORY.
+    THE MASTER'S VIOLIN.
+    THE BOOK OF CLEVER BEASTS.
+    AT THE SIGN OF THE JACK-O'-LANTERN.
+    A SPINNER IN THE SUN.
+    LOVE AFFAIRS OF LITERARY MEN.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+Notes on Men                                                           3
+Concerning Women                                                      25
+The Philosophy of Love                                                49
+The Lost Art of Courtship                                             71
+The Natural History of Proposals                                      93
+Love Letters: Old and New                                            115
+An Inquiry into Marriage                                             137
+The Physiology of Vanity                                             161
+Widowers and Widows                                                  183
+The Consolations of Spinsterhood                                     205
+
+
+
+
+Notes on Men
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Notes on Men
+
+[Sidenote: "The Proper Study"]
+
+
+If "the proper study of mankind is man," it is also the chief delight of
+woman. It is not surprising that men are conceited, since the thought of
+the entire population is centred upon them.
+
+Women are wont to consider man in general as a simple creation. It is
+not until the individual comes into the field of the feminine telescope,
+and his peculiarities are thrown into high relief, that he is seen and
+judged at his true value.
+
+When a girl once turns her attention from the species to the individual,
+her parlour becomes a sort of psychological laboratory in which she
+conducts various experiments; not, however, without the loss of friends.
+For men are impatient of the spirit of inquiry in woman.
+
+[Sidenote: The Phenomena of Affection]
+
+How shall a girl acquire her knowledge of the phenomena of affection, if
+men are not willing to be questioned upon the subject? What is more
+natural than to seek wisdom from the man a girl has just refused to
+marry? Why should she not ask if he has ever loved before, how long he
+has loved her, if he were not surprised when he found it out, and how he
+feels in her presence?
+
+Yet a sensitive spinster is repeatedly astonished at finding her lover
+transformed into a fiend, without other provocation than this. He
+accuses her of being "a heartless coquette," of having "led him
+on,"--whatever that may mean,--and he does not care to have her for his
+sister, or even for his friend.
+
+[Sidenote: Original Research]
+
+Occasionally a charitable man will open his heart for the benefit of the
+patient student. If he is of a scientific turn of mind, with a fondness
+for original research, he may even take a melancholy pleasure in the
+analysis.
+
+Thus she learns that he thought he had loved, until he cared for her,
+but in the light of the new passion he sees clearly that the others were
+mere, idle flirtations. To her surprise, she also discovers that he has
+loved her a long time but has never dared to speak of it before, and
+that this feeling, compared with the others, is as wine unto water. In
+her presence he is uplifted, exalted, and often afraid, for very love of
+her.
+
+Next to a proposal, the most interesting thing in the world to a woman
+is this kind of analysis. If a man is clever at it, he may change a
+decided refusal to a timid promise to "think about it." The man who
+hesitates may be lost, but the woman who hesitates is surely won.
+
+In the beginning, the student is often perplexed by the magnitude of the
+task which lies before her. Later, she comes to know that men, like
+cats, need only to be stroked in the right direction. The problem thus
+becomes a question of direction, which is seldom as simple as it looks.
+
+[Sidenote: The Personal Equation]
+
+Yet men, as a class, are easier to understand than women, because they
+are less emotional. It is emotion which complicates the personal
+equation with radicals and quadratics, and life which proceeds upon
+predestined lines soon becomes monotonous and loses its charm. The
+involved _x_ in the equation continually postpones the definite result,
+which may often be surmised, but never achieved.
+
+Still, there is little doubt as to the proper method, for some of the
+radicals must necessarily appear in the result. Man's conceit is his
+social foundation and when the vulnerable spot is once found in the
+armour of Achilles, the overthrow of the strenuous Greek is near at
+hand.
+
+There is nothing in the world as harmless and as utterly joyous as man's
+conceit. The woman who will not pander to it is ungracious indeed.
+
+Man's interest in himself is purely altruistic and springs from an
+unselfish desire to please. He values physical symmetry because one's
+first impression of him is apt to be favourable. Manly accomplishments
+and evidences of good breeding are desirable for the same reason, and he
+likes to think his way of doing things is the best, regardless of actual
+effectiveness.
+
+[Sidenote: Pencils]
+
+For instance, there seems to be no good reason why a man's way of
+sharpening a pencil is any better than a woman's. It is difficult to see
+just why it is advisable to cover the thumb with powdered graphite, and
+expose that useful member to possible amputation by a knife directed
+uncompromisingly toward it, when the pencil might be pointed the other
+way, the risk of amputation avoided, and the shavings and pulverised
+graphite left safely to the action of gravitation and centrifugal force.
+Yet the entire race of men refuse to see the true value of the feminine
+method, and, indeed, any man would rather sharpen any woman's pencil
+than see her do it herself.
+
+[Sidenote: The "Supreme Conceit"]
+
+It pleases a man very much to be told that he "knows the world," even
+though his acquaintance be limited to the flesh and the devil--a
+gentleman, by the way, who is much misunderstood and whose faults are
+persistently exaggerated. But man's supreme conceit is in regard to his
+personal appearance. Let a single entry in a laboratory note-book
+suffice for proof.
+
+_Time, evening. MAN is reading a story in a current magazine to the GIRL
+he is calling upon._
+
+MAN. "Are you interested in this?"
+
+GIRL. "Certainly, but I can think of other things too, can't I?"
+
+MAN. "That depends on the 'other things.' What are they?"
+
+GIRL. (_Calmly._) "I was just thinking that you are an extremely
+handsome man, but of course you know that."
+
+MAN. (_Crimsoning to his temples._) "You flatter me!" (_Resumes
+reading._)
+
+Girl. (_Awaits developments._)
+
+MAN. (_After a little._) "I didn't know you thought I was good-looking."
+
+GIRL. (_Demurely._) "Didn't you?"
+
+MAN. (_Clears his throat and continues the story._)
+
+MAN. (_After a few minutes._) "Did you ever hear anybody else say that?"
+
+GIRL. "Say what?"
+
+MAN. "Why, that I was--that I was--well, good-looking, you know?"
+
+GIRL. "Oh, yes! Lots of people!"
+
+MAN. (_After reading half a page._) "I don't think this is so very
+interesting, do you?"
+
+GIRL. "No, it isn't. It doesn't carry out the promise of its beginning."
+
+MAN. (_Closes magazine and wanders aimlessly toward the mirror in the
+mantel._)
+
+MAN. "Which way do you like my hair; this way, or parted in the middle?"
+
+GIRL. "I don't know--this way, I guess. I've never seen it parted in the
+middle."
+
+MAN. (_Taking out pocket comb and rapidly parting his hair in the
+middle._) "There! Which way do you like it?"
+
+GIRL. (_Judicially._) "I don't know. It's really a very hard question to
+decide."
+
+MAN. (_Reminiscently._) "I've gone off my looks a good deal lately. I
+used to be a lot better looking than I am now."
+
+GIRL. (_Softly._) "I'm glad I didn't know you then."
+
+MAN. (_In apparent astonishment._) "Why?"
+
+GIRL. "Because I might not have been heart whole, as I am now."
+
+(_Long silence._)
+
+MAN. (_With sudden enthusiasm._) "I'll tell you, though, I really do
+look well in evening dress."
+
+GIRL. "I haven't a doubt of it, even though I've never seen you wear
+it."
+
+MAN. (_After brief meditation._) "Let's go and hear Melba next week,
+will you? I meant to ask you when I first came in, but we got to
+reading."
+
+GIRL. "I shall be charmed."
+
+_Next day, GIRL gets a box of chocolates and a dozen American
+Beauties--in February at that._
+
+[Sidenote: Dimples and Dress Clothes]
+
+Tell a man he has a dimple and he will say "where?" in pleased surprise,
+meanwhile putting his finger straight into it. He has studied that
+dimple in the mirror too many times to be unmindful of its geography.
+
+Let the woman dearest to a man say, tenderly: "You were so handsome
+to-night, dear--I was proud of you." See his face light up with noble,
+unselfish joy, because he has given such pleasure to others!
+
+All the married men at evening receptions have gone because they "look
+so well in evening dress," and because "so few men can wear dress
+clothes really well." In truth, it does require distinction and grace of
+bearing, if a man would not be mistaken for a waiter.
+
+Man's conceit is not love of himself but of his fellow-men. The man who
+is in love with himself need not fear that any woman will ever become a
+serious rival. Not unfrequently, when a man asks a woman to marry him,
+he means that he wants her to help him love himself, and if, blinded by
+her own feeling, she takes him for her captain, her pleasure craft
+becomes a pirate ship, the colours change to a black flag with a
+sinister sign, and her inevitable destiny is the coral reef.
+
+[Sidenote: Palmistry]
+
+Palmistry does very well for a beginning if a man is inclined to be shy.
+It leads by gentle and almost imperceptible degrees to that most
+interesting of all subjects, himself, and to that tactful comment,
+dearest of all to the masculine heart; "You are not like other men!"
+
+A man will spend an entire evening, utterly oblivious of the lapse of
+time, while a woman subjects him to careful analysis. But sympathy,
+rather than sarcasm, must be her guide--if she wants him to come again.
+A man will make a comrade of the woman who stimulates him to higher
+achievement, but he will love the one who makes herself a mirror for his
+conceit.
+
+Men claim that women cannot keep a secret, but it is a common failing. A
+man will always tell some one person the thing which is told him in
+confidence. If he is married, he tells his wife. Then the exclusive bit
+of news is rapidly syndicated, and by gentle degrees, the secret is
+diffused through the community. This is the most pathetic thing in
+matrimony--the regularity with which husbands relate the irregularities
+of their friends. Very little of the world's woe is caused by silence,
+however it may be in fiction and the drama.
+
+[Sidenote: Exchange of Confidence]
+
+In return for the generous confidence regarding other people's doings,
+the married man is made conversant with those things which his wife
+deems it right and proper for him to know. And he is not unhappy, for it
+isn't what he doesn't know that troubles a man, but what he knows he
+doesn't know.
+
+The masculine nature is less capable of concealment than the feminine.
+Where men are frankly selfish, women are secretly so. Man's vices are
+few and comprehensive; woman's petty and innumerable. Any man who is not
+in the penitentiary has at most but three or four, while a woman will
+hide a dozen under her social mask and defy detection.
+
+Women are said to be fickle, but are they more so than men? A man's
+ideal is as variable as the wind. What he thinks is his ideal of woman
+is usually a glorified image of the last girl he happened to admire. The
+man who has had a decided preference for blondes all his life, finally
+installs a brown-eyed deity at his hearthstone. If he has been fond of
+petite and coquettish damsels, he marries some Diana moulded on large
+lines and unconcerned as to mice.
+
+A man will ride, row, and swim with one girl and marry another who is
+afraid of horses, turns pale at the mention of a boat, and who would
+look forward to an interview with His Satanic Majesty with more ease and
+confidence than to a dip in the summer sea.
+
+[Sidenote: Portia and Carmen]
+
+Theoretically, men admire "reasonable women," with the uncommon quality
+which is called "common sense," but it is the woman of caprice, the
+sweet, illogical despot of a thousand moods, who is most often and most
+tenderly loved. Man is by nature a discoverer. It is not beauty which
+holds him, but rather mystery and charm. To see the one woman through
+all the changing moods--to discern Portia through Carmen's witchery--is
+the thing above all others which captivates a man.
+
+[Sidenote: The Dorcas Ideal]
+
+Deep in his heart, man cherishes the Dorcas ideal. The old, lingering
+notions of womanliness are not quite dispelled, but in this, as in
+other things, nothing sickens a man of his pet theory like seeing it in
+operation.
+
+It may be a charming sight to behold a girl stirring cheese in the
+chafing-dish, wearing an air of deep concern when it "bunnies" at the
+sides and requires still more skill. It may also be attractive to see
+white fingers weave wonders with fine linen and delicate silks, with
+pretty eagerness as to shade and stitch.
+
+But in the after-years, when his divinity, redolent of the kitchen,
+meets him at the door, with hair dishevelled and fingers bandaged, it is
+subtly different from the chafing-dish days, and the crisp chops,
+generously black with charcoal, are not as good as her rarebits used to
+be. The memory of the silk and fine linen also fades somewhat, in the
+presence of darning which contains hard lumps and patches which
+immediately come off.
+
+It has become the fashion to speak of woman as the eager hunter, and man
+as the timid, reluctant prey. The comic papers may have started it, but
+modern society certainly lends colour to the pretty theory. It is
+frequently attributed to Mr. Darwin, but he is at times unjustly blamed
+by those who do not read his pleasing works.
+
+The complexities in man's personal equation are caused by variants of
+three emotions; a mutable fondness for women, according to temperament
+and opportunity, a more uniform feeling toward money, and the universal,
+devastating desire--the old, old passion for food.
+
+[Sidenote: The Key of Happiness]
+
+The first variant is but partially under the control of any particular
+woman, and the less she concerns herself with the second, the better it
+is for both, but she who stimulates and satisfies the third variant
+holds in her hands the golden key of happiness. No woman need envy the
+Sphinx her wisdom if she has learned the uses of silence and never asks
+a favour of a hungry man.
+
+A woman makes her chief mistake when she judges a man by herself and
+attributes to him indirection and complexity of motive. When she wishes
+to attract a particular man, she goes at it indirectly. She makes
+friends of "his sisters, his cousins, and his aunts," and assumes an
+interest in his chum. She ignores him at first and thus arouses his
+curiosity. Later, she condescends to smile upon him and he is mildly
+pleased, because he thinks he has been working for that very smile and
+has finally won it. In this manner he is lured toward the net.
+
+[Sidenote: The Wise Virgin]
+
+When a girl systematically and effectively feeds a man, she is leading
+trumps. He insensibly associates her with his comfort and thus she
+becomes his necessity. When a man seeks a woman's society it is because
+he has need of her, not because he thinks she has need of him; and the
+parlour of the girl who realises it, is the envy of every unattached
+damsel on the street. If the wise one is an expert with the
+chafing-dish, she may frequently bag desirable game, while the foolish
+virgins who have no alcohol in their lamps are hunting eagerly for the
+trail.
+
+Because she herself works indirectly, she thinks he intends a tender
+look at another girl for a carom shot, and frequently a far-sighted
+maiden can see the evidences of a consuming passion for herself in a
+man's devotion to someone else.
+
+Men are not sufficiently diplomatic to bother with finesse of this kind.
+Other things being equal, a man goes to see the girl he wants to see.
+It does not often occur to her that he may not want to see her, may be
+interested in someone else, or that he may have forgotten all about her.
+
+[Sidenote: "Encouragement"]
+
+There is a common feminine delusion to the effect that men need
+"encouragement" and there is no term which is more misused. A fool may
+need "encouragement," but the man who wants a girl will go after her,
+regardless of obstacles. As for him, if he is fed at her house, even
+irregularly, he may know that she looks with favour upon his suit.
+
+[Sidenote: "Platonic Friendship"]
+
+The parents of both, the neighbours, and even the girl herself, usually
+know that a man is in love before he finds it out. Sometimes he has to
+be told. He has approached a stage of acute and immediate peril when he
+recognises what he calls "a platonic friendship."
+
+Young men believe platonic friendship possible; old men know better--but
+when one man learns to profit by the experience of another, we may look
+for mosquitoes at Christmas and holly in June.
+
+There is an exquisite danger attached to friendships of this kind, and
+is it not danger, rather than variety, which is "the spice of life?"
+Relieved of the presence of that social pace-maker, the chaperone, the
+disciples of Plato are wont to take long walks, and further on, they
+spend whole days in the country with book and wheel.
+
+A book is a mysterious bond of union, and by their taste in books do a
+man and woman unerringly know each other. Two people who unite in
+admiration of Browning are apt to admire each other, and those who
+habitually seek Emerson for new courage may easily find the world more
+kindly if they face it hand in hand.
+
+A latter-day philosopher has remarked upon the subtle sympathy produced
+by marked passages. "The method is so easy and so unsuspect. You have
+only to put faint pencil marks against the tenderest passages in your
+favourite new poet, and lend the volume to Her, and She has only to
+leave here and there the dropped violet of a timid, confirmatory
+initial, for you to know your fate."
+
+[Sidenote: The High-Priest]
+
+A man never has a platonic friendship with a woman it is impossible for
+him to love. Cupid is the high-priest at these rites of reading aloud
+and discussing everything under the sun. The two become so closely bound
+that one arrow strikes both, and often the happiest marriages are those
+whose love has so begun, for when the Great Passion dies, as it
+sometimes does, sympathy and mutual understanding may yield a generous
+measure of content.
+
+The present happy era of fiction closes a story abruptly at the altar or
+else begins it immediately after the ceremony. Thence the enthralled
+reader is conducted through rapture, doubt, misunderstanding,
+indifference, complications, recrimination, and estrangement to the
+logical end in cynicism and the divorce court.
+
+In the books which women write, the hero of the story shoulders the
+blame, and often has to bear his creator's vituperation in addition to
+his other troubles. When a man essays this theme in fiction, he shows
+clearly that it is the woman's fault. When the situation is presented
+outside of books, the happily married critics distribute condemnation in
+the same way, it being customary for each partner in a happy marriage to
+claim the entire credit for the mutual content.
+
+[Sidenote: Pursuit and Possession]
+
+Over the afternoon tea cups it has been decided with unusual and
+refreshing accord, that "it is pursuit and not possession with a man."
+True--but is it less true with women?
+
+When Her Ladyship finally acquires the sealskin coat on which she has
+long set her heart, does she continue to scan the advertisements? Does
+she still coddle him who hath all power as to sealskin coats, with
+tempting dishes and unusual smiles? Not unless she wants something else.
+
+Still, it is woman's tendency to make the best of what she has, and
+man's to reach out for what he has not. Man spends his life in the
+effort to realise the ideals which, like will-o'-the-wisps, hover just
+beyond him. Woman, on the contrary, brings into her life what grace she
+may, by idealising her reals.
+
+In her secret heart, woman holds her unchanging ideal of her own
+possible perfection. Sometimes a man suspects this, and loves her all
+the more for the sweet guardian angel which is thus enthroned. Other
+men, less fine, consider an ideal a sort of disease--and they are
+usually a certain specific.
+
+But, after all, men are as women make them. Cleopatra and Helen of Troy
+swayed empires and rocked thrones. There is no woman who does not hold
+within her little hands some man's achievement, some man's future, and
+his belief in woman and God.
+
+She may fire him with high ambition, exalt him with noble striving, or
+make him a coward and a thief. She may show him the way to the gold of
+the world, or blind him with tinsel which he may not keep. It is she who
+leads him to the door of glory and so thrills him with majestic purpose,
+that nothing this side Heaven seems beyond his eager reach.
+
+[Sidenote: The Potter's Hand]
+
+Upon his heart she may write ecstasy or black despair. Through the long
+night she may ever beckon, whispering courage, and by her magic making
+victory of defeat. It is for her to say whether his face shall be
+world-scarred and weary, hiding tragedy behind its piteous lines;
+whether there shall be light or darkness in his soul. He cannot escape
+those soft, compelling fingers; she is the arbiter of his destiny--for
+like clay in the potter's hands, she moulds him as she will.
+
+
+
+
+Concerning Women
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Concerning Women
+
+
+In order to be happy, a woman needs only a good digestion, a
+satisfactory complexion, and a lover. The first requirement being met,
+the second is not difficult to obtain, and the third follows as a matter
+of course.
+
+[Sidenote: Nagging]
+
+He was a wise philosopher who first considered crime as disease, for
+women are naturally sweet-tempered and charming. The shrew and the scold
+are to be reformed only by a physician, and as for nagging, is it not
+allopathic scolding in homeopathic doses?
+
+A well woman is usually a happy one, and incidentally, those around her
+share her content. The irritation produced by fifteen minutes of nagging
+speaks volumes for the personal influence which might be directed the
+other way, and the desired result more easily obtained.
+
+[Sidenote: Diversions]
+
+The sun around which woman revolves is Love. Her whole life is spent in
+search of it, consciously or unconsciously. Incidental diversions in
+the way of "career" and "independence" are usually caused by domestic
+unhappiness, or, in the case of spinsters, the fear of it.
+
+If all men were lovers, there would be no "new woman" movement, no
+sociological studies of "Woman in Business," no ponderous analyses of
+"The Industrial Condition of Women" in weighty journals. Still more than
+a man, a woman needs a home, though it be but the tiniest room.
+
+Even the self-reliant woman of affairs who battles bravely by day in the
+commercial arena has her little nook, made dainty by feminine touches,
+to which she gladly creeps at night. Would it not be sweeter if it were
+shared by one who would always love her? As truly as she needs her bread
+and meat, woman needs love, and, did he but know it, man needs it too,
+though in lesser degree.
+
+[Sidenote: The Verity and the Vision]
+
+Lacking the daily expression of it which is the sweet unction of her
+hungry soul, she seeks solace in an ideal world of her own making. It is
+because the verity jars upon her vision that she takes a melancholy view
+of life.
+
+One of woman's keenest pleasures is sorrow. Her tears are not all pain.
+She goes to the theatre, not to laugh, but to weep. The clever
+playwright who closes his last scene with a bitter parting is sure of a
+large clientage, composed almost wholly of women. Sad books are written
+by men, with an eye to women readers, and women dearly love to wear the
+willow in print.
+
+Women are unconscious queens of tragedy. Each one, in thought, plays to
+a sympathetic but invisible audience. She lifts her daily living to a
+plane of art, finding in fiction, music, pictures, and the stage
+continual reminders of her own experience.
+
+Does her husband, distraught with business cares, leave her hurriedly
+and without the customary morning kiss? Woman, on her way to market,
+rapidly reviews similar instances in fiction, in which this first
+forgetting proved to be "the little rift within the lute."
+
+The pictures of distracted ladies, wild as to hair and vision, are sold
+in photogravure by countless thousands--to women. An attraction on the
+boards which is rumoured to be "so sad," leads woman to economise in
+the matter of roasts and desserts that she may go and enjoy an
+afternoon of misery. Girls suffer all their lives long from being taken
+to mirthful plays, or to vaudeville, which is unmixed delight to a man
+and intolerably cheerful to a woman.
+
+[Sidenote: Woman and Death]
+
+Woman and Death are close friends in art. Opera is her greatest joy,
+because a great many people are slaughtered in the course of a single
+performance, and somebody usually goes raving mad for love. When Melba
+sings the mad scene from _Lucia_, and that beautiful voice descends by
+lingering half-notes from madness and nameless longing to love and
+prayer, the women in the house sob in sheer delight and clutch the hands
+of their companions in an ecstasy of pain.
+
+In proportion as women enjoy sorrow, men shrink from it. A man cannot
+bear to be continually reminded of the woman he has loved and lost,
+while woman's dearest keepsakes are old love letters and the shoes of a
+little child. If the lover or the child is dead, the treasures are never
+to be duplicated or replaced, but if the pristine owner of the shoes has
+grown to stalwart manhood and the writer of the love letters is a
+tender and devoted husband, the sorrowful interest is merely mitigated.
+It is not by any means lost.
+
+[Sidenote: "The Eternal Womanly"]
+
+Just why it should be considered sad to marry one's lover and for a
+child to grow up, can never be understood by men. There are many things
+in the "eternal womanly" which men understand about as well as a kitten
+does the binomial theorem, but some mysteries become simple enough when
+the leading fact is grasped--that woman's song of life is written in a
+minor key and that she actually enjoys the semblance of sorrow. Still,
+the average woman wishes to be idealised and strongly objects to being
+understood.
+
+[Sidenote: "Tears, Idle Tears"]
+
+Woman's tears mean no more than the sparks from an overcharged dynamo;
+they are simply emotional relief. Married men gradually come to realise
+it, and this is why a suspicion of tears in his sweetheart's eyes means
+infinitely more to a lover than a fit of hysterics does to a husband.
+
+We are wont to speak of woman's tenderness, but there is no tenderness
+like that of a man for the woman he loves when she is tired or
+troubled, and the man who has learned simply to love a woman at crucial
+moments, and to postpone the inevitable idiotic questioning till a more
+auspicious time, has in his hands the talisman of domestic felicity.
+
+If by any chance the lachrymal glands were to be dried up, woman's life
+would lose a goodly share of its charm. There is nothing to cry on which
+compares with a man's shoulder; almost any man will do at a critical
+moment; but the clavicle of a lover is by far the most desirable. If the
+flood is copious and a collar or an immaculate shirt-front can be
+spoiled, the scene acquires new and distinct value. A pillow does very
+well, lacking the shoulder, for many of the most attractive women in
+fiction habitually cry into pillows--because they have no lover, or
+because the brute dislikes tears.
+
+When grief strikes deep, a woman's eyes are dry. Her soul shudders and
+there is a hand upon her heart whose icy fingers clutch at the inward
+fibre in a very real physical pain. There are no tears for times like
+these; the inner depths, bare and quivering, are healed by no such balm
+as this.
+
+A sudden blow leaves a woman as cold as a marble statue and absolutely
+dumb as to the thing which lies upon her heart. When the tears begin to
+flow, it means that resignation and content will surely come. On the
+contrary, when once or twice in a lifetime a man is moved to tears,
+there is nothing so terrible and so hopeless as his sobbing grief.
+
+Married and unmarried women waste a great deal of time in feeling sorry
+for each other. It never occurs to a married woman that a spinster may
+not care to take the troublous step. An ideal lover in one's heart is
+less strain upon the imagination than the transfiguration of a man who
+goes around in his shirt-sleeves and dispenses with his collar at ninety
+degrees Fahrenheit.
+
+[Sidenote: The Unknown Country]
+
+If fiction dealt pleasantly with men who are unmindful of small
+courtesies, the unknown country beyond the altar would lose some of its
+fear. If the way of an engaged girl lies past a barber shop,--which very
+seldom has a curtain, by the way,--and she happens to think that she may
+some day behold her beloved in the dangerous act of shaving himself, it
+immediately hardens her heart. One glimpse of one face covered with
+lather will postpone one wedding-day five weeks. Many a lover has
+attributed to caprice or coquetry the fault which lies at the door of
+the "tonsorial parlour."
+
+[Sidenote: Other Feminine Eyes]
+
+A woman may be a mystery to a man and to herself, but never to another
+woman. There is no concealment which is effectual when other feminine
+eyes are fixed upon one's small and harmless schemes. A glance at a
+girl's dressing-table is sufficient for the intimate friend--she does
+not need to ask questions; and indeed, there are few situations in life
+in which the necessity for direct questions is not a confession of
+individual weakness.
+
+If fourteen different kinds of creams and emollients are within easy
+reach, the girl has an admirer who is fond of out-door sports and has
+not yet declared himself. If the curling iron is kept hot, it is because
+he has looked approval when her hair was waved. If there is a box of
+rouge but half concealed, the girl thinks the man is a fatuous idiot and
+hourly expects a proposal.
+
+If the various drugs are in the dental line, the man is a cheerful soul
+with a tendency to be humorous. If she is particular as to small
+details of scolding locks and eyebrows, he probably wears glasses. If
+she devotes unusual attention to her nails, the affair has progressed to
+that interesting stage where he may hold her hand for a few minutes at a
+time.
+
+If she selects her handkerchief with extreme care,--one with an initial
+and a faint odour of violet--she expects to give it to him to carry and
+to forget to ask for it. If he makes an extra call in order to return
+it, it indicates a lesser degree of interest than if he says nothing
+about it. The forgotten handkerchief is an important straw with a girl
+when love's capricious wind blows her way.
+
+It is not entirely without reason that womankind in general blames "the
+other woman" for defection of any kind. Short-sighted woman thinks it a
+mighty tribute to her own charm to secure the passing interest of
+another's 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 again!
+
+[Sidenote: Perennial Youth]
+
+Still, age is not a matter of birthdays, but of the heart. Some women
+are mature cynics at twenty, while a grey-haired matron of fifty seems
+to have found the secret of perennial youth. There is little to choose,
+as regards beauty and charm, between the young, unformed girl, whose
+soft eyes look with longing into the unyielding future which gives her
+no hint of its purposes, and the mature woman, well-groomed,
+self-reliant to her finger-tips, who has drunk deeply of life's cup and
+found it sweet. A woman is never old until the little finger of her
+glove is allowed to project beyond the finger itself and she orders her
+new photographs from an old plate in preference to sitting again.
+
+In all the seven ages of man, there is someone whom she may attract. If
+she is twenty-five, the boy who has just attained long trousers will not
+buy her striped sticks of peppermint and ask shyly if he may carry her
+books. She is not apt to wear fraternity pins and decorate her rooms in
+college colours, unless her lover still holds his alma mater in fond
+remembrance. But there are others, always the others--and is it less
+sweet to inspire the love which lasts than the tender verses of a
+Sophomore? Her field of action is not sensibly limited, for at twenty
+men love woman, at thirty a woman, and at forty, women.
+
+[Sidenote: Three Weapons]
+
+Woman has three weapons--flattery, food, and flirtation, and only the
+last of these is ever denied her by Time. With the first she appeals to
+man's conceit, with the second to his heart, which is suspected to lie
+at the end of the oesophagus, rather than over among lungs and ribs, and
+with the third to his natural rivalry of his fellows. But the pleasures
+of the chase grow beautifully less when age brings rheumatism and
+kindred ills.
+
+Besides, may she not always be a chaperone? When a political orator
+refers effectively to "the cancer which is eating at the heart of the
+body politic," someway, it always makes a girl think of a chaperone. She
+goes, ostensibly, to lend a decorous air to whatever proceedings may be
+in view. She is to keep the man from making love to the girl. Whispers
+and tender hand clasps are occasionally possible, however, for, tell it
+not in Gath! the chaperone was once young herself and at times looks the
+other way.
+
+That is, unless she is the girl's mother. Trust a parent for keeping two
+eyes and a pair of glasses on a girl! Trust the non-matchmaking mother
+for four new eyes under her back hair and a double row of ears arranged
+laterally along her anxious spine! And yet, if the estimable lady had
+not been married herself, it is altogether likely that the girl would
+never have thought of it.
+
+[Sidenote: The Chaperone]
+
+The reason usually given for chaperonage is that it gives the girl a
+chance to become acquainted with the man. Of course, in the presence of
+a chaperone, a man says and does exactly the same things he would if he
+were alone with the maiden of his choice. He does not mind making love
+to a girl in her mother's presence. He does not even care to be alone
+with her when he proposes to her. He would like to have some chaperone
+read his letters--he always writes with this intention. At any time
+during the latter part of the month it fills him with delight to see the
+chaperone order a lobster after they have all had oysters.
+
+Nonsense! Why do not the leaders of society say, frankly: "This
+chaperone business is just a little game. Our husbands are either at
+the club or soundly asleep at home. It is not nice to go around alone,
+and it is pathetic to go in pairs, with no man. We will go with our
+daughters and their young friends, for they have cavaliers enough and to
+spare. Let us get out and see the world, lest we die of ennui and
+neglect!" It is the chaperone who really goes with the young man. She
+takes the girl along to escape gossip.
+
+[Sidenote: Behold his House!]
+
+It is strange, when it is woman's avowed object to make man happy, that
+she insists upon doing it in her own way, rather than in his. He likes
+the rich, warm colours; the deep reds and dark greens. Behold his house!
+
+Renaissance curtains obscure the landscape with delicate tracery, and he
+realises what it might mean to wear a veil. Soft tones of rose and Nile
+green appear in his drawing-room. Chippendale chairs, upon which he
+fears to sit, invite the jaded soul to whatever repose it can get. See
+the sofa cushions, which he has learned by bitter experience never to
+touch! Does he rouse a quiescent Nemesis by laying his weary head upon
+that elaborate embroidery? Not unless his memory is poor.
+
+[Sidenote: Home Comforts]
+
+Take careful note of the bric-à-brac upon his library table. See the few
+square inches of blotting paper on a cylinder which he can roll over his
+letter--the three stamps stuck together more closely than brothers,
+generously set aside for his use. Does he find comfort here? Not very
+much of it.
+
+See the dainty dinner which is set before the hungry man. A cup of
+rarest china holds four ounces of clear broth. A stick of bread or two
+crackers are allotted to him. Then he may have two croquettes, or one
+small chop, when his soul is athirst for rare roast beef and steak an
+inch thick. Then a nice salad, made of three lettuce leaves and a
+suspicion of oil, another cracker and a cubic inch of cheese, an ounce
+of coffee in a miniature cup, and behold, the man is fed!
+
+Why should he go to his club, call loudly for flesh-pots, sink into a
+chair he is not afraid of breaking, and forget his trouble in the
+evening paper, while his wife is at home, alone, or having a Roman
+holiday as a chaperone?
+
+It is a simple thing to acquire a lover, but it is a fine art to keep
+him. Clubs were originally intended for the homeless, as distinguished
+from the unmarried. The rare woman who rests and soothes a man when he
+is tired has no rival in the club. Misunderstanding, sorrowful, yearning
+for what she has lost, woman contemplates the wreck of her girlish
+dream.
+
+[Sidenote: The Heart of a Woman]
+
+There are three things man is destined never to solve--perpetual motion,
+the square of the circle, and the heart of a woman. Yet he may go a
+little way into the labyrinth with the thread of love, which his Ariadne
+will gladly give him at the door.
+
+The dim chambers are fragrant with precious things, for through the
+winding passages Memory has strewn rue and lavender, love and longing;
+sweet spikenard and instinctive belief. Some day, when the heart aches,
+she will brew content from these.
+
+There are barriers which he may not pass, secret treasures that he may
+not see, dreams that he may not guess. There are dark corners where
+there has been torture, of which he will never know. There are shadows
+and ghostly shapes which Penelope has hidden with the fairest fabrics of
+her loom. There are doors, tightly locked, which he has no key to open;
+rooms which have contained costly vessels, empty and deep with dust.
+
+There is no other step than his, for he walks there alone; sometimes to
+the music of dead days and sometimes to the laughter of a little child.
+The petals of crushed roses rustle at his feet--his roses--in the inmost
+places of her heart. And beyond, of spotless marble, with the infinite
+calm of mountains and perpetual snow, is something which he seldom
+comprehends--her love of her own whiteness.
+
+It is a wondrous thing. For it is so small he could hold it in the
+hollow of his hand, yet it is great enough to shelter him forever. All
+the world may not break it if his love is steadfast and unchanging, and
+loving him, it becomes deep enough to love and pity all the world.
+
+It is a tender thing. So often is it wounded that it cannot see another
+suffer, and its own pain is easier far to bear. It makes a shield of its
+very tenderness, gladly receiving the stabs that were meant for him,
+forgiving always, and forgetting when it may.
+
+[Sidenote: The Solace]
+
+Yet, after all, it is a simple thing. For in times of deepest doubt and
+trouble, it requires for its solace only the tender look, the whispered
+word which brings new courage, and the old-time grace of the lover's
+way.
+
+
+
+
+The Philosophy of Love
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+The Philosophy of Love
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Prevailing Theme]
+
+A modern novelist has greatly lamented because the prevailing theme of
+fiction is love. Every story is a love story, every romance finds its
+inspiration in the heart, and even the musty tomes of history are beset
+by the little blind god.
+
+One or two men have dared to write books from which women have been
+excluded as rigorously as from the Chinese stage, but the world of
+readers has not loudly clamoured for more of the same sort. A story of
+adventure loses none of its interest if there is some fair damsel to be
+rescued from various thrilling situations.
+
+The realists contend that a single isolated fact should not be dwelt
+upon to the exclusion of all other interests, that love plays but a
+small part in the life of the average man or woman, and that it is
+unreasonable to expand it to the uttermost limits of art.
+
+Strangely enough, the realists are all men. If a woman ventures to write
+a book which may fitly be classed under the head of realism, the critics
+charitably unite upon insanity as the cause of it and lament the lost
+womanliness of a decadent generation.
+
+If realism were actually real, we should have no time for books and
+pictures. Our days and nights would be spent in reclaiming the people in
+the slums. There would be a visible increase in the church fair--where
+we spend more than we can afford for things we do not want, in order to
+please people whom we do not like, and to help heathen who are happier
+than we are.
+
+[Sidenote: The Root of all Good]
+
+The love of money is said to be the root of all evil, but love itself is
+the root of all good, for it is the very foundation of the social
+structure. The universal race for the elusive shilling, which is
+commonly considered selfish, is based upon love.
+
+Money will buy fine houses, but who would wish to live in a mansion
+alone! Fast horses, yachts, private cars, and the feasts of Lucullus,
+are not to be enjoyed in solitude; they must be shared. Buying jewels
+and costly raiment is the purest philanthropy, for it gives pleasure to
+others. Sapphires and real lace depreciate rapidly in the cloister or
+the desert.
+
+The envy which luxury sometimes creates is also altruistic in character,
+for in its last analysis, it is the wish to give pleasure to others, in
+the same degree, as the envied fortunately may. Nothing is happiness
+which is not shared by at least one other, and nothing is truly sorrow
+unless it is borne absolutely alone.
+
+[Sidenote: Love]
+
+Love! The delight and the torment of the world! The despair of
+philosophers and sages, the rapture of poets, the confusion of cynics,
+and the warrior's defeat!
+
+Love! The bread and the wine of life, the hunger and the thirst, the
+hurt and the healing, the only wound which is cured by another! The
+guest who comes like a thief in the night! The eternal question which is
+its own answer, the thing which has no beginning and no end!
+
+The very blindness of it is divine, for it sees no imperfections, takes
+no reck of faults, and concerns itself only with the hidden beauty of
+the soul.
+
+It is unselfishness--yet it tolerates no rival and demands all for
+itself. It is belief--and yet it doubts. It is hope and it is also
+misgiving. It is trust and distrust, the strongest temptation and the
+power to withstand it; woman's need and man's dream. It is his enemy and
+his best friend, her weakness and her strength; the roses and the
+thorns.
+
+Woman's love affairs begin in her infancy, with some childish play at
+sweethearts, and a cavalier in dresses for her hero. It may be a matter
+of affinity in later years, or, as the more prosaic Buckle suggests,
+dependent upon the price of corn, but at first it is certainly a
+question of propinquity.
+
+Through the kindergarten and the multiplication table, the pretty game
+goes on. Before she is thirteen, she decides to marry, and selects an
+awkward boy a little older for the happy man. She cherishes him in her
+secret heart, and it does not matter in the least if she does not know
+him well enough to speak to him, for the good fairies who preside over
+earthly destinies will undoubtedly lead The Prince to become formally
+acquainted at the proper time.
+
+[Sidenote: The Self-Conscious Period]
+
+Later, the self-conscious period approaches and Mademoiselle becomes
+solicitous as to ribbons and personal adornment. She pleads earnestly
+for long gowns, and the first one is never satisfying unless it drags.
+If she can do her hair in a twist "just like mamma's," and see the
+adored one pass the house, while she sits at the window with sewing or
+book, she feels actually "grown up."
+
+When she begins to read novels, her schoolmates, for the time being, are
+cast aside, because none of them are in the least like the lovers who
+stalk through the highly-coloured pages of the books she likes best. The
+hero is usually "tall and dark, with a melancholy cast of countenance,"
+and there are fascinating hints of some secret sorrow. The watchful
+maternal parent is apt to confiscate these interesting volumes, but
+there are always school desks and safe places in the neighbourhood of
+pillows, and a candle does not throw its beams too far.
+
+The books in which the love scenes are most violent possess unfading
+charm. A hero who says "darling" every time he opens his
+finely-chiselled mouth is very near perfection. That fondness lasts
+well into the after-years, for "darling" is, above all others, the
+favourite term of endearment with a woman.
+
+Were it not for the stern parents and wholesome laws as to age, girls
+might more often marry their first loves. It is difficult to conjecture
+what the state of civilisation might be, if it were common for people to
+marry their first loves, regardless of "age, colour, or previous
+condition of servitude."
+
+[Sidenote: Age and Colour]
+
+Age and colour are all-important factors with Mademoiselle. She could
+not possibly love a boy three weeks younger than herself, and if her
+eyes are blue and her hair light, no blondes need apply.
+
+There is a curious delusion, fostered by phrenologists and other amiable
+students of "temperament," to the effect that a brunette must infallibly
+fall in love with a blonde and vice versa. What dire misfortune may
+result if this rule is not followed can be only surmised, for the
+phrenologists do not know. Still, the majority of men are dark and it is
+said they do not marry as readily as of yore--is this the secret of the
+widespread havoc made by peroxide of hydrogen?
+
+The lurid fiction fever soon runs its course with Mademoiselle, if she
+is let alone, and she turns her attention once more to her schoolmates.
+She has at least a dozen serious attacks before she is twenty, and at
+that ripe age, is often a little _blasé_.
+
+[Sidenote: The Pastime and the Dream]
+
+But the day soon comes when the pretty play is over and the soft eyes
+widen with fear. She passes the dividing line between childhood and
+womanhood when she first realises that her pastime and her dream have
+forged chains around her inmost soul. This, then, is what life holds for
+her; it is ecstasy or torture, and for this very thing she was made.
+
+Some man exists whom she will follow to the end of the world, right
+royally if she may, but on her knees if she must. The burning sands of
+the desert will be as soft grass if he walks beside her, his voice will
+make her forget her thirst, and his touch upon her arm will change her
+weariness into peace.
+
+When he beckons she must answer. When he says "come," she must not stay.
+She must be all things to him--friend, comrade, sweetheart, wife. When
+the infinite meaning of her dream slowly dawns upon her, is it strange
+that she trembles and grows pale?
+
+Soon or late it comes to all. Sometimes there is terror at the sudden
+meeting and Love often comes in the guise of a friend. But always, it
+brings joy which is sorrow, and pain which is happiness--gladness which
+is never content.
+
+A woman wants a man to love her in the way she loves him; a man wants a
+woman to love him in the way he loves her, and because the thing is
+impossible, neither is satisfied.
+
+[Sidenote: The Strongest Passion]
+
+Man's emotion is far stronger than woman's. His feeling, when it is
+deep, is a force which a woman may but dimly understand. The strongest
+passion of a man's life is his love for his sweetheart; woman's greatest
+love is lavished upon her child.
+
+"One is the lover and one is the loved." Sometimes the positions are
+reversed, to the misery of all concerned, but normally, man is the
+lover. He wins love by pleading for it, and there is no way by which a
+woman may more surely lose it, for while woman's pity is closely akin to
+Love, man's pity is a poor relation who wears Love's cast-off clothes.
+
+There are two other ways in which a woman loses her lover. One is by
+marrying him and the other by retaining him as her friend. If she can
+keep him as her friend, she never believes in his love, and husbands and
+lovers are often two very different possessions.
+
+A man's heart is an office desk, wherein tender episodes are
+pigeon-holed for future reference. If he is too busy to look them over,
+they are carried off later in Father Time's junk-wagon, like other and
+more profane history.
+
+All the isolated loves of a woman's life are woven into a single
+continuous fabric. Love itself is the thing she needs and the man who
+offers it seldom matters much. Man loves and worships woman, but woman
+loves love. Were it not so, there would be no actor's photograph upon
+the matinée girl's dressing-table, and no bit of tender verse would be
+fastened to her cushion with a hat pin, while she herself was fancy
+free.
+
+[Sidenote: Gift and Giver]
+
+All her life long she confuses the gift with the giver, and loving with
+the pride of being loved, because her love is responsive rather than
+original.
+
+[Sidenote: The Forgotten Harp]
+
+She demands that the lover's devotion shall continue after marriage;
+that every look shall be tender and every word adoring. Failing this,
+she knows that love is dead. She is inevitably disappointed in marriage,
+because she is no longer his fear, intoxication, and pain, but rather
+his comrade and friend. The vibrant strings, struck from silence and
+dreams to a sounding chord, are trembling still--whispering lingering
+music to him who has forgotten the harp.
+
+When a woman once tells a man she loves him, he regards it as some
+chemical process which has taken place in her heart and he never
+considers the possibility of change. He is little concerned as to its
+expression, for he knows it is there. On the contrary, it is only by
+expression that a woman ever feels certain of a man's love.
+
+Doubt is the essential and constant quality of her nature, when once she
+loves. She continually demands new proof and new devotion, consoling
+herself sometimes with the thought that three days ago he said he loved
+her and there has been no discord since.
+
+As for him, if his comfort is assured, he never thinks to question her,
+for men are as blind as Love. If she seems glad to see him and is not
+distinctly unpleasant, she may even be a little preoccupied without
+arousing suspicion. A man likes to feel that he is loved and a woman
+likes to be told.
+
+The use of any faculty exhausts it. The ear, deafened by a cannon, is
+incapable for the moment of hearing the human voice. The eyes,
+momentarily blinded by the full glare of the sun, miss the delicate
+shades of violet and sapphire in the smoke from a wood fire. We soon
+become accustomed to condiments and perfume, and the same law applies to
+sentiment and emotion.
+
+[Sidenote: The Lover's Devotion]
+
+Thus it seems to women that men love spasmodically--that the lover's
+devotion is a series of unrelated acts based upon momentary impulse,
+rather than a steady purpose. They forget that the heart may need more
+rest than the interval between beats.
+
+[Sidenote: Attraction and Repulsion]
+
+If a man and woman who truly loved each other were cast away upon a
+desert island, he would tire of her long before she wearied of him. The
+sequence of attraction and repulsion, the ultimate balance of positive
+and negative, are familiar electrical phenomena. Is it unreasonable to
+suppose that the supreme form of attraction is governed by the same law?
+
+Strong attractions frequently begin with strong repulsions, sometimes
+mutual, but more often on the part of the attracting force. A man seldom
+develops a violent and inexplicable hatred for a woman and later finds
+that it has unaccountably changed to love.
+
+Yet a woman often marries a man she has sincerely hated, and the
+explanation is simple enough, perhaps, for a woman never hates a man
+unless he is in some sense her master. Love and hate are kindred
+passions with a woman and the depth of the one is the possible measure
+of the other.
+
+She is wise who fully understands her weapon of coquetry. She will send
+her lover from her at the moment his love is strongest, and he will
+often seek her in vain. She will be parsimonious with her letters and
+caresses and thus keep her attraction at its height. If he is forever
+unsatisfied, he will always be her lover, for satiety must precede
+repulsion.
+
+No woman need fear the effect of absence upon the man who honestly
+loves her. The needle of the compass, regardless of intervening seas,
+points forever toward the north. Pitiful indeed is she who fails to be a
+magnet and blindly becomes a chain.
+
+The age has brought with it woman's desire for equality, at least in the
+matter of love. She wishes to be as free to seek a man as he is to seek
+her--to love him as freely and frankly as he does her. Why should she
+withhold her lips after her heart has surrendered? Why should she keep
+the pretence of coyness long after she has been won?
+
+[Sidenote: The Old, Old Law]
+
+Far beneath the tinsel of our restless age lies the old, old law, and
+she who scorns it does so at the peril of all she holds most dear.
+Legislation may at times be disobeyed, but never law, for the breaking
+brings swift punishment of its own.
+
+Too often a generous-hearted woman makes the mistake of full revelation.
+She wishes him to understand her every deed, her every thought. Nothing
+is left to his imagination--the innermost corners of her heart are laid
+bare. Given the woman and the circumstances, he would infallibly know
+her action. This is why the husbands of the "practical," the
+"methodical," and the "reasonable" women may be tender and devoted, but
+are never lovers after marriage.
+
+If Alexander had been a woman, he would not have sighed for more worlds
+to conquer--woman asks but one. If his world had been a clever woman he
+would have had no time for alien planets, because a man will never lose
+his interest in a woman while his conquest is incomplete.
+
+The woman who is most tenderly loved and whose husband is still her
+lover, carefully conceals from him the fact that she is fully won. There
+is always something he has yet to gain.
+
+[Sidenote: A Carmen at Heart]
+
+After ten years of marriage, if the old relation remains the same, it is
+because she is a Carmen at heart. She is alluring, tempting, cajoling
+and scorning in the same breath; at once tender and commanding,
+inspiring both love and fear, baffling and eluding even while she is
+leading him on.
+
+She gives him veiled hints of her real personality, but he never
+penetrates her mask. Could he see for an instant into the secret depths
+of her soul, he would understand that her concealment and her coquetry,
+her mystery and her charm, are nothing but her love, playing a desperate
+game against Time and man's nature, for the dear stake of his own.
+
+Dumas draws a fine distinction when he says: "A man may have two
+passions but never two loves: whoever has loved twice has never loved at
+all." If this is true, the dividing line is so exceedingly fine that it
+is beyond woman's understanding, and it may be surmised that even man
+does not fully realise it until he is old and grey.
+
+[Sidenote: The Cords of Memory]
+
+Yet somewhere, in every man's heart, is hidden a woman's face. To that
+inner chamber no other image ever finds its way. The cords of memory
+which hold it are strong as steel and as tender as the heart-fibre of
+which they are made.
+
+There is no time in his life when those eyes would not thrill him and
+those lips make him tremble--no hour when the sound of that voice would
+not summon him like a trumpet-call.
+
+No loyalty or allegiance is powerful enough to smother it within his own
+heart, in spite of the conditions to which he may outwardly conform.
+Other passions may temporarily hide it even from his own sight, yet in
+reality it is supreme, from the day of its birth to the door of his
+grave.
+
+He may be happily married, as the world counts happiness, and She may be
+dead--but never forgotten. No real love or hate is wrought upon by
+Lethe. The thousand dreams of her will send his blood in passionate flow
+and the thousand memories of her whiten his face with pain. Friendship
+is intermittent and passion forgets, but man's single love is eternal.
+
+Because woman's love is responsive, it never dies. Her love of love is
+everlasting. Some threads in the fabric she has woven are like shining
+silver; others are sombre, broken, and stained with tears. When a man
+has once taught a woman to believe his love is true, she is already,
+though unconsciously, won.
+
+All the beauty in woman's life is forever associated with her love.
+Violets bring the memory of dead days, when the boy-lover brought them
+to her in fragrant heaps. Some women say man's love is selfish, but
+there is no one among them who has ever been loved by a boy.
+
+[Sidenote: Some Lost Song]
+
+Broken, hesitant chords set some lost song to singing in her heart. The
+break in her lover's voice is like another, long ago. Summer days and
+summer fields, silver streams, and clouds of apple blossoms set against
+the turquoise sky, bring back the Mays of childhood and all the childish
+dreams.
+
+This is another thing a man cannot understand--that every little
+tenderness of his wakes the memory of all past tenderness, and for that
+very reason is often doubly sweet. This is the explanation of sudden
+sadness, of the swift succession of moods, and of lips, shut on sobs,
+that sometimes quiver beneath his own.
+
+Woman keeps alive the old ideals. Were it not for her eager efforts,
+chivalry would have died long ago. King Arthur's Court is said to be a
+myth, and Lancelot and Guenevere were only dreams, but the knightly
+spirit still lives in man's love for woman.
+
+[Sidenote: The Lady of the Court]
+
+The Lady of the Court was wont to send her knight into danger at her
+sweet, capricious will. Her glove upon his helmet, her scarf upon his
+arm, her colours on his shield--were they worth the risk of horse and
+spear? Yet the little that she gave him, made him invincible in the
+field.
+
+To-day there is a subtle change. She is loved as dearly as was
+Guenevere, but she gives him neither scarf nor glove. Her love in his
+heart is truly his shield and his colours are the white of her soul.
+
+He needs no gage but her belief, and having that, it is a trust only a
+coward will betray. The battle is still to the strong, but just as
+surely her knight comes back with his shield untarnished, his colours
+unstained, and his heart aglow with love of her who gave him courage.
+
+The centuries have brought new striving, which the Lady of the Court
+could never know. The daughter of to-day endeavours to be worthy of the
+knightly worship--to be royal in her heart and queenly in her giving; to
+be the exquisitely womanly woman he sees behind her faulty clay, so that
+if the veil of illusion he has woven around her should ever fall away,
+the reality might be even fairer than his dream.
+
+Through the sombre pages of history the knights and ladies move, as
+though woven in the magic web of the Lady of Shalott. Tournament and
+shield and spear, the Round Table and Camelot, have taken on the mystery
+of fables and dreams.
+
+[Sidenote: By Grace of Magic]
+
+Yet, by the grace of magic, the sweet old story lives to-day,
+unforgotten, because of its single motive. Elaine still dies for love of
+Lancelot, Isolde urges Tristram to new proofs of devotion, and
+Guenevere, the beautiful, still shares King Arthur's throne. For
+chivalry is not dead--- it only sleeps--and the nobleness and valour of
+that far-off time are ever at the service of her who has found her
+knight.
+
+
+
+
+The Lost Art of Courtship
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+The Lost Art of Courtship
+
+
+[Sidenote: Liberty of Choice]
+
+Civilisation is so acutely developed at present that the old meaning of
+courtship is completely lost. None of the phenomena which precede a
+proposal would be deemed singular or out of place in a platonic
+friendship. This state of affairs gives a man every advantage and all
+possible liberty of choice.
+
+Our grandparents are scandalised at modern methods. "Girls never did
+so," in the distant years when those dear people were young. If a young
+man called on grandmother once a week, and she approved of him and his
+prospects, she began on her household linen, without waiting for the
+momentous question.
+
+Judging by the fiction of the period and by the delightful tales of old
+New England, which read like fairy stories to this generation, the
+courtships of those days were too leisurely to be very interesting.
+Ten-year engagements did not seem to be unusual, and it was not
+considered a social mistake if a man suddenly disappeared for four or
+five years, without the formality of mentioning his destination to the
+young woman who expected to marry him.
+
+[Sidenote: Faithful Maidens]
+
+We have all read of the faithful maidens who kept on weaving stores of
+fine linen and making regular pilgrimages for the letter which did not
+come. Years afterward, when the man finally appeared, it was all right,
+and the wedding went on just the same, even though in the meantime the
+recreant knight had married and been bereaved.
+
+Two or three homeless children were sometimes brought cheerfully into
+the story, and assisted materially in the continuation of the
+interrupted courtship. The tears which the modern spinster sheds over
+such a tale are not at the pathos of the situation, but because it is
+possible, even in fiction, for a woman to be so destitute of spirit.
+
+[Sidenote: Without Saying a Word]
+
+"In dem days," as Uncle Remus would say, any attention whatever meant
+business. Small courtesies which are without significance now were
+fraught with momentous import then. In this year of grace, among all
+races except our own, there are ways in which a man may definitely
+commit himself without saying a word.
+
+A flower or a serenade is almost equivalent to a proposal in sunny
+Spain. A "walking-out" period of six months is much in vogue in other
+parts of Europe, but the daughter of the Anglo-Saxon has no such guide
+to a man's intentions.
+
+Among certain savage tribes, if a man is in love with a girl and wishes
+to marry her, he drags her around his tent by the hair or administers a
+severe beating. It may be surmised that these attentions are not
+altogether pleasant, but she has the advantage of knowing what the man
+means.
+
+Flowers are a pretty courtesy and nothing more. The kindly thought which
+prompts them may be as transient as their bloom. Three or four men
+serenade girls on summer nights because they love to hear themselves
+sing. Books, and music, and sweets, which convention decrees are the
+only proper gifts for the unattached, may be sent to any girl, without
+affecting her indifference to furniture advertisements and January sales
+of linen.
+
+If there is any actual courtship at the present time, the girl does just
+as much of it as the man. Her dainty remembrances at holiday time have
+little more meaning than the trifles a man bestows upon her, though the
+gift latitude accorded her is much wider in scope.
+
+[Sidenote: Furniture]
+
+When a girl gives a man furniture, she usually intends to marry him, but
+often merely succeeds in making things interesting for the girl who does
+it in spite of her. The newly-married woman attends to the personal
+belongings of her happy possessor with the celerity which is taught in
+classes for "First Aid to the Injured."
+
+One by one, the cherished souvenirs of his bachelor days disappear.
+Pictures painted by rival fair ones go to adorn the servant's room,
+through gradual retirement backward. Rare china is mysteriously broken.
+Sofa cushions never "harmonise with the tone of the room," and the
+covers have to be changed. It takes time, but usually by the first
+anniversary of a man's marriage, his penates have been nobly weeded
+out, and the things he has left are of his wife's choosing, generously
+purchased with his own money.
+
+Woe to the girl who gives a man a scarf-pin! When the bride returns the
+initial call, that scarf-pin adds conspicuously to her adornment. The
+calm appropriation makes the giver grind her teeth--- and the bride
+knows it.
+
+In the man's presence, the keeper of his heart and conscience will say,
+sweetly: "Oh, my dear, such a dreadful thing has happened! That
+exquisitely embroidered scarf you made for Tom's chiffonier is utterly
+ruined! The colours ran the first time it was washed. You have no idea
+how I feel about it--it was such a beautiful thing!"
+
+The wretched donor of the scarf attempts consolation by saying that it
+doesn't matter. It never was intended for Tom, but as every stitch in it
+was taken while he was with her, he insisted that he must have it as a
+souvenir of that happy summer. She adds that it was carefully washed
+before it was given to him, that she has never known that kind of silk
+to fade, and that something must have been done to it to make the
+colours run.
+
+[Sidenote: A Pitched Battle]
+
+The short-sighted man at this juncture felicitates himself because the
+two are getting on so well together. He never realises that a pitched
+battle has occurred under his very nose, and that the honours are about
+even.
+
+If Tom possesses a particularly unfortunate flash-light photograph of
+the girl, the bride joyfully frames it and puts it on the mantel where
+all may see. If the original of the caricature remonstrates, the happy
+wife sweetly temporises and insists that it remain, because "Tom is so
+fond of it," and says, "it looks just like her."
+
+Devious indeed are the paths of woman. She far excels the "Heathen
+Chinee" in his famous specialty of "ways that are dark and tricks that
+are vain."
+
+Courtship is a game that a girl has to play without knowing the trump.
+The only way she ever succeeds at it is by playing to an imaginary trump
+of her own, which may be either open, disarming friendliness, or simple
+indifference.
+
+When a man finds the way to a woman's heart a boulevard, he has taken
+the wrong road. When his path is easy and his burden light, it is time
+for him to doubt. When his progress seems like making a new way to the
+Klondike, he needs only to keep his courage and go on.
+
+For, after all, it is woman who decides. A clever girl may usually marry
+any man she sees fit to honour with the responsibility of her bills. The
+ardent lover counts for considerably less than he is wont to suppose.
+
+[Sidenote: The Only One They Know]
+
+There is a good old scheme which the world of lovers has unanimously
+adopted, in order to find out where they stand. It is so simple as to
+make one weep, but it is the only one they know. This consists of an
+intentional absence, judiciously timed.
+
+Suppose a man has been spending three or four evenings a week with the
+same girl, for a period of two or three months. Flowers, books, and
+chocolates have occasionally appeared, as well as invitations to the
+theatre. The man has been fed out of the chafing-dish, and also with
+accidental cake, for men are as fond of sugar as women, though they are
+ashamed to admit it.
+
+Suddenly, without warning, the man misses an evening, then another, then
+another. Two weeks go by, and still no man. The neighbours and the
+family begin to ask questions of a personal nature.
+
+It is at this stage that the immature and childish woman will write the
+man a note, expressing regret for his long absence, and trusting that
+nothing may interfere with their "pleasant friendship." Sometimes the
+note brings the man back immediately and sometimes it doesn't. He very
+seldom condescends to make an explanation. If he does, it is merely a
+casual allusion to "business." This is the only excuse even a bright man
+can think of.
+
+[Sidenote: "Climbing a Tree"]
+
+This act is technically known among girls as "climbing a tree." When a
+man does it, he wants a girl to bring a ladder and a lunch and plead
+with him to come down and be happy, but doing as he wishes is no way to
+attract a man up a tree.
+
+Men are as impervious to tears and pleadings as a good mackintosh to
+mist, but at the touch of indifference, they melt like wax. So when her
+quondam lover attempts metaphorical athletics, the wise girl smiles and
+withdraws into her shell.
+
+She takes care that he shall not see her unless he comes to her. She
+draws the shades the moment the lamps are lighted. If he happens to pass
+the house in the evening, he may think she is out, or that she has
+company--it is all the same to her. She arranges various evenings with
+girl friends and gets books from the library. This is known as
+"provisioning the citadel for a siege."
+
+[Sidenote: Pride and Pride]
+
+It is a contest between pride and pride which occurs in every courtship,
+and the girl usually wins. True lovers are as certain to return as
+Bo-Peep's flock or a systematically deported cat. Shame-faced, but
+surely, the man comes back.
+
+Various laboratory note-books yield the same result. A single entry
+indicates the general trend of the affair.
+
+_MAN calls on GIRL after five weeks of unexplained absence. She asks no
+questions, but keeps the conversation impersonal, even after he shows
+symptoms of wishing to change its character._
+
+MAN. (_Finally._) "I haven't seen you for an awfully long time."
+
+GIRL. "Haven't you? Now that I think of it, it has been some time."
+
+MAN. "How long has it been, I wonder?"
+
+GIRL. "I haven't the least idea. Ten days or two weeks, I guess."
+
+MAN. (_Hastily._) "Oh no, it's been much longer than that. Let's see,
+it's"--(_makes great effort with memory_)--"why, it's five weeks! Five
+weeks and three days! Don't you remember?"
+
+GIRL. "I hadn't thought of it. It doesn't seem that long. How time does
+fly, doesn't it!" (_Long silence._)
+
+MAN. "I've been awfully busy. I wanted to come over, but I just
+couldn't."
+
+GIRL. "I've been very busy, too." (_Voluminous detail of her affairs
+follows, entirely pleasant in character._)
+
+MAN. (_Tenderly._) "Were you so busy you didn't miss me?"
+
+GIRL. "Why, I can't say I missed you, exactly, but I always thought of
+you pleasantly."
+
+MAN. "Did you think of me often?"
+
+GIRL. (_Laughing._) "I didn't keep any record of it. Do you want me to
+cut a notch in the handle of my parasol every time I think of you? If
+all my friends were so exacting, I'd have time for nothing else. I'd
+need a new one every week and the house would be full of shavings. All
+my fingers would be cut, too."
+
+MAN. (_Unconsciously showing his hand._) "I thought you'd write me a
+note."
+
+[Sidenote: His Short Suit]
+
+GIRL. (_Leading his short suit._) "You could have waited on your front
+steps till the garbage man took you away, and I wouldn't have written
+you any note."
+
+MAN. (_With evident sincerity._) "That's no dream! I could do just
+that!" (_Proposal follows in due course, MAN making full and complete
+confession._)
+
+If he is foolish enough to complicate his game with another girl, he
+loses much more than he gains, for he lowers the whole affair to the
+level of a flirtation, and destroys any belief the girl may have had in
+him. He also forces her to do the same thing, in self-defence.
+Flirtation is the only game in which it is advisable and popular to
+trump one's partner's ace.
+
+He who would win a woman must challenge her admiration, prove himself
+worthy of her regard, appeal to her sympathy--and then wound her. She
+is never wholly his until she realises that he has the power to make her
+miserable as well as to make her happy, and that love is an infinite
+capacity for suffering.
+
+A man who does it consciously is apt to overdo it, out of sheer
+enthusiasm, and if a girl suspects that it is done intentionally, the
+hurt loses its sting and changes her love to bitterness. A succession of
+attempts is also useless, for a man never hurts a woman twice in exactly
+the same way. When he has run the range of possible stabs, she is out of
+his reach--unless she is his wife.
+
+[Sidenote: A State Secret]
+
+The intentional absence scheme is too transparent to succeed, and
+temporary devotion to another girl is definite damage to his cause, for
+it indicates fickleness and instability. There is only one way by which
+a man may discover his true position without asking any questions, and
+that is--a state secret. Now and then a man strikes it by accident, but
+nobody ever tells--even brothers or platonic friends.
+
+Some men select a wife as they would a horse, paying due attention to
+appearance, gait, disposition, age, teeth, and grooming. High spirits
+and a little wildness are rather desirable than otherwise, if both are
+young. Men who have had many horses or many wives and have grown old
+with both, have a slight inclination toward sedate ways and domestic
+traits.
+
+[Sidenote: The "Woman's Column"]
+
+Modern society makes it fully as easy to choose the one as the other. In
+communities where the chaperone idea is at its prosperous zenith, a man
+may see a girl under nearly all circumstances. The men who conduct the
+"Woman's Column" in many pleasing journals are still writing of the
+effect it has on a man to catch a girl in curl papers of a morning,
+though curl papers have been obsolete for many and many a moon.
+
+Cycling, golf, and kindred out-door amusements have been the death of
+careless morning attire. Uncorseted woman is unhappy woman, and the girl
+of whom the versatile journalist writes died long ago. Perhaps it is
+because a newspaper man can write anything at four minutes' notice and
+do it well, that the press fairly reeks with "advice to women."
+
+The question, propounded in a newspaper column, "What Kind of a Girl
+Does a Man Like Best," will bring out a voluminous symposium which adds
+materially to the gaiety of the nation. It would be only fair to have
+this sort of thing temporarily reversed--to tell men how to make home
+happy for their wives and how to keep a woman's love, after it has once
+been given.
+
+Some clever newspaper woman might win everlasting laurels for herself if
+she would contribute to this much neglected branch of human knowledge.
+How is a man to know that a shirt-front which looks like a railroad map
+diverts one's mind from his instructive remarks? How is he to know that
+a cane is a nuisance when he fares forth with a girl? It is true that
+sisters might possibly attempt this, but the modern sister is heavily
+overworked at present and it is not kind to suggest an addition to her
+cares.
+
+[Sidenote: Neglected By His Kind]
+
+There is no advice of any sort given to men except on the single subject
+of choosing a wife. This is to be found only in the books in the
+Sabbath-School library, or in occasional columns of the limited number
+of saffron dailies which illuminate the age. Surely, man has been
+neglected by his kind!
+
+[Sidenote: Indecision]
+
+The general masculine attitude indicates widespread belief in the
+promise, "Ask, and ye shall receive." A man will tell his best friend
+that he doesn't know whether to marry a certain girl. If she hears of
+his indecision there is trouble ahead, if he finally decides in the
+affirmative, and it is quite possible that he may not marry her.
+
+After the door of a woman's heart has once swung on its silent hinges, a
+man thinks he can prop it open with a brick and go away and leave it. A
+storm is apt to displace the brick, however--and there is a heavy spring
+on the door. Woe to the masculine finger that is in the way!
+
+A man often hesitates between two young women and asks his friends which
+he shall marry. Custom has permitted the courtship of both and neither
+has the right to feel aggrieved, because it is exceedingly bad form for
+a girl to love a man before he has asked her to.
+
+Now and then a third girl is a man's confidante at this trying period.
+Nothing so bores a person as to be a man's "guide, philosopher and
+friend" in his perplexities with other girls. To one distinct class of
+women men tell their troubles and the other class sees that they have
+plenty to tell. It is better to be in the second category than in the
+first.
+
+Sooner or later, the confidante explains the whole affair to the
+subjects of the confidence and strange, new kinds of trouble immediately
+come to the rash man. It is a common failing to expect another person to
+keep a secret which we have just proved is beyond our own capability.
+
+[Sidenote: The Adamantine Fortress]
+
+When a man has once deeply wounded a woman's pride, he may just as well
+give up his hope of winning her. At that barrier, the little blind god
+may plead in vain. Love's face may be sad, his big, sightless eyes soft
+with tears, and his helpless hands outstretched in pleading and prayer,
+but that stern sentinel will never yield. Wounded love is easily
+forgiven, wounded belief sometimes forgotten, but wounded pride--never.
+It is the adamantine fortress. There is only one path which leads to the
+house of forgiveness--that of understanding, and it is impassable if
+woman's pride has come between.
+
+A girl never knows whether a courtship is in progress or not, unless a
+man tells her. He may be interested and amused, but not in love. It is
+only in the comic papers that a stern parent waits upon the continuous
+caller and demands to know his "intentions," so a girl must, perforce,
+be her own guide.
+
+[Sidenote: The Continuous Caller]
+
+A man may call upon a girl so constantly and so regularly that the
+neighbours daily expect wedding invitations, and the family inquire why
+he does not have his trunk sent to the house. Later, quite casually, he
+will announce his engagement to a girl who is somewhere else. This
+fiancée is always a peculiarly broad-minded girl who knows all about her
+lover's attentions to the other and does not in the least object. She
+wants him to "have a good time" when he is away from her, and he is
+naturally anxious to please her. He wants the other girl to know his
+wife--he is sure they will be good friends.
+
+Lasting feminine friendships are not built upon foundations of that
+kind. It is very unfortunate, for the world would be gladdened by many
+more than now exist.
+
+According to geometry, "things which are equal to the same thing are
+equal to each other," and it would seem, from the standpoint of pure
+reason, that people who are fond of the same people would naturally be
+congenial and take pleasure in being together.
+
+But a sensitive spinster is often grieved when she discovers that her
+men friends do not readily assimilate. If she leaves two of them to
+entertain each other, the conversation does not flow with desirable
+spontaneity. There is no lack of courtesy between them, however, even of
+that finer sort which keeps them both there, lest one, by leaving,
+should seem to remind his companion that it was late.
+
+On the contrary, if a man is fond of two different girls, they are
+seldom to be seen apart. They exchange long visits regularly and this
+thoughtfulness often saves him from making an extra call.
+
+[Sidenote: A Happy Triumvirate]
+
+A happy triumvirate is thus formed and the claws of it do not show.
+Sometimes it is hard to decide between them, and he cuts the Gordian
+knot by marrying someone else, but the friendship is never the same
+afterward. The girls are no longer boon companions and when the man
+crosses their paths, they manage to convey the impression of great
+distance.
+
+[Sidenote: Narrowed Down to Two]
+
+In the beginning, almost any number may join in the game, but the
+inevitable process of selection eventually narrows it down to two.
+Society has given men a little the best of it, but perhaps woman's finer
+sight compensates her for the apparent disadvantages--and even Love, who
+deals the cards, is too blind to see the fatal consequences of his
+mistakes.
+
+
+
+
+The Natural History of Proposals
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+The Natural History of Proposals
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Inquiring Spinster]
+
+There is no subject which presents more difficulties to the inquiring
+spinster. Contemporary spinsters, when approached upon the topic, are
+anything but encouraging; apparently lacking the ability to distinguish
+between impertinent intrusion into their personal affairs and the
+scientific spirit which prompts the collection of statistics.
+
+Married women, when asked to repeat the exact language of the lover at
+the happy moment, are wont to transfix the sensitive aspirant for
+knowledge with lofty scorn. Mothers are accustomed to dissemble and say
+they "have forgotten." Men in general are uncommunicative, though
+occasionally some rare soul will expand under the influence of food and
+freely give more valuable information than can be extracted from an
+indefinite number of women.
+
+One's own experience is naturally limited, even though proposals
+constitute the main joy and excitement of the spinster's monotonous
+life. Emerson says: "All is sour if seen as experience," though the
+gentle sage was not referring especially to offers of marriage.
+Nevertheless, there is a charm about other people's affairs which would
+render life beautiful indeed if it could be added to one's own.
+
+Nothing strengthens a woman's self-confidence like a proposal. One is a
+wonder, two a superfluity, and three an epidemic. Four are proof of
+unusual charm, five go to the head, and it is a rare girl whom six or
+seven will not permanently spoil.
+
+[Sidenote: Disillusion]
+
+To the girl fed upon fiction, the first proposal comes in the nature of
+a shock. Disillusion follows as a matter of course. Men, evidently, do
+not read fiction, or at least do not profit by the valuable hints to be
+found in any novel.
+
+A small book entitled: _How Men Propose_, was eagerly sought by young
+women who were awaiting definite experience. This was discovered to be a
+collection of proposals carefully selected from fiction. It was done
+with care and discernment, but was not satisfying. The natural
+inference was that the actual affairs were just like those in the book.
+
+[Sidenote: "In Books?"]
+
+Nothing can exceed the grace and tenderness with which men propose--in
+books. Such chivalrous worship, such pleasing deference is accorded--in
+books! Such pretty pleading, such knightly vows of eternal allegiance,
+as are always found--in books!
+
+The hero of a few years back was wont to make his offer on his knees. He
+also haunted the home of the beloved maiden, deeming himself well repaid
+for five hours wait if he had a fleeting glimpse of her at the window.
+Torn hair was frequent, and refusal drove men to suicide and madness.
+
+The young women who were the cause of all this trouble were never more
+than eighteen or twenty years of age. Mature spinsters of twenty-five
+figured as envious deterrents in the happy affair. Many a story-book
+marriage has been spoiled by the jealousy of the wrinkled rival of
+twenty-five.
+
+[Sidenote: The First Proposal]
+
+The violent protestations of the lover in the novel were indeed
+something to be awaited with fear and trembling. With her anticipations
+aroused by this kind of reading and her eagerness whetted by
+interminable years of waiting, Mademoiselle receives her first offer of
+marriage.
+
+She is in doubt, at first, as to whether it is a proposal. It seems like
+some dreadful mistake. Where is the courtly manner of the lover in the
+book? What is the matter with this red-faced boy? Where is the pretty
+pleading, the gracious speech? Why should a lover stammer and confuse
+his verbs?
+
+Mademoiselle recoils in disgust. This, then, is what she has been
+waiting for. It is not at all like the book. Her lover is entirely
+different from other girls' lovers--so different that he is pathetic.
+
+Her faith in the gospel of romance is sadly shaken, when the next
+experience is a great deal like the first. No one, in the book, could
+doubt the lover's meaning. Yet in the halting sentences and confused
+metaphors of actual experience, there is sometimes much question as to
+what he really means. A girl often has to ask a man if he has just
+proposed to her, that she may accept or refuse, in a gracious and proper
+way.
+
+[Sidenote: The Ordeal]
+
+In a girl's early ideas on the subject, she has much sympathy for the
+man who has to undergo the ordeal of asking a woman to be his wife. She
+thinks he must contemplate the momentous step for weeks, await the
+opportunity with expectant terror, and when his lady is in a happy mood,
+recite with fear and trembling, the proposal which he has written out
+and learned, appropriately enough, by heart.
+
+Later, she comes to know that after the first few times, men propose as
+thoughtlessly and easily as they dress for dinner, that they devote no
+particular study to the art, that constant practice makes them
+proficient, and that almost any girl will do when the proposal mood is
+on.
+
+She discovers that they often do it simply to make a pleasing impression
+upon a girl, with no thought of acceptance. Many an engagement is more
+of a surprise to the man than to anybody else.
+
+Because fiction comes very near to the heart of woman, she invariably
+follows its dictates and shows great astonishment at every proposal. The
+women who have been thus surprised are even more rare than days in
+June.
+
+[Sidenote: The False and the True]
+
+When a man begins to compare a girl to a flower, a baby, or a kitten,
+she knows what is coming next. She spends her mental energy in
+distinguishing the false from the true--which is sufficient employment
+for anyone. There is not enough cerebral tissue to waste much of it upon
+unnecessary processes.
+
+It is very hard to tell whether a man really means a proposal. It may
+have been made under romantic circumstances, or because he was lonesome
+for the other girl, or, in the case of an heiress, because he was tired
+of work. Longing for the absent sweetheart will frequently cause a man
+to become engaged to someone near by, because, though absence may make a
+woman's heart grow fonder, it is presence that plays the mischief with a
+man. No wise girl would accept a man who proposed by moonlight or just
+after a meal. The dear things aren't themselves then.
+
+Food, properly served, will attract a proposal at almost any time,
+especially if it is known that the pleasing viands were of the girl's
+own making. Cooking and love may seem at first glance to be widely
+separated, but no woman can have one without the other. The brotherly
+love for all creation, which emanates from the well-fed man, overflows,
+concentrates, and naturally becomes a proposal.
+
+[Sidenote: Written Proposals]
+
+Other things being equal, a written proposal is apt to be genuine,
+especially if it is signed with the full name and address of the writer,
+and the date is not omitted. Long and painful experience in the courts
+of his country has made man wary of direct evidence.
+
+But a written proposal is extremely bad form. A girl never can be sure
+that her lover did not attempt to fish it out of the letter-box after it
+had slipped from his fingers. The author of _How to Be Happy, Though
+Married_, once saw a miserable young man attempting to get his
+convicting letter back by means of a forked stick. The sight must be
+quite common everywhere. Proposing in haste and repenting at leisure is
+not by any means unusual.
+
+Then, too, a girl misses a possible opportunity of seeing a man blush
+and stammer. One does not often get a chance to see a man willingly
+making himself ridiculous, and the spectacle is worth waiting for.
+
+[Sidenote: Confusion and Awkwardness]
+
+Confusion and awkwardness are high trumps with a woman, for they
+indicate inexperience and uncertainty. The man who proposes in a
+finished and nonchalant manner, as if he had done it frequently and were
+sure of the result, is now and then astonished at a refusal. It is also
+a risk to offer a ring immediately after acceptance. The suspicion is
+that the ring has been worn before, or else the man was sure enough of
+the girl to invest heavily in his future.
+
+Sometimes a man will disclose to a platonic friend the form he
+habitually employs in proposals. The hero of battle engagements has
+proverbial charm for woman, and the hero of matrimonial engagements is
+meat and drink to the spinster athirst for knowledge.
+
+Feed the man, and when the brotherly love for the entire universe begins
+to radiate, approach him gently upon the subject.
+
+"Why, bless your little heart," the man will say, "of course I'll tell
+you about it. Yes, you're right in supposing that I know more about it
+than anyone else you know. I've never been refused in my life and I
+know I've asked a hundred. I've had medals for that.
+
+"I always try to make each one different," he will continue. "Girls
+sometimes compare notes and it makes it awkward. The girl I'm engaged to
+now doesn't know any of my other girls, though, so I'm safe enough.
+
+[Sidenote: "One of the Best Proposals"]
+
+"I'll never forget the way I did that. I think it was one of the best
+proposals I ever made. She's a mighty pretty little thing,--blue eyes
+and black hair,--a regular Irish type. I must tell you first, though,
+how I came to know her.
+
+"The one I was engaged to just before I asked her, had just broken it
+off on account of property which her children would lose if she married
+again. She was a widow, you know. I've told you about her--the one with
+red hair. Between you and me, that's the only woman in God's world my
+heart ever went out to. That is the love of my life. Her little girl,
+eleven years old, was in love with me, too. She used to tremble when I
+kissed her, and was jealous of her mother. But this little girl I'm
+engaged to now, why I just love the ground she walks on.
+
+[Sidenote: "A Very Peculiar Affair"]
+
+"Well," after a pause, "this was a very peculiar affair. Of course I was
+all broken up over losing her--couldn't eat nor sleep--I was a perfect
+wreck. This old friend of mine happened along, and he says, 'You'll have
+to brace up, old man. Come on out to my house in the country and rest up
+a bit.' So I went, and met his daughter.
+
+"Five days after I met her, I asked him for her hand. I explained it to
+him just as I would to my own father, and he understood all right. He's
+a fine fellow. He said I could have her. Of course I'd asked her first.
+
+"Yes--I'm getting to that. I took her out for a walk one afternoon, and
+when we came to the river, we sat down to talk. It was a perfect day. I
+began by saying how sad it was to see a beautiful flower and to know
+that it was out of one's reach, or to see anything beautiful and know
+that one never could possess it. I led up to the subject by gentle
+degrees, and then I said: 'You must have seen that I love you, and you
+know without my telling you, that I want you to be my wife. I don't say
+I want you to marry me, because I want you to do more than that--I want
+you to be my wife.' (Fine distinction that!)
+
+"Well, she was very much surprised, of course, but she accepted me all
+right. Yes, I told her about the other woman, but in such a way that she
+understood it perfectly. Lots of other fellows wanted her and I snatched
+the prize from right under their very noses. I don't suppose I'll ever
+propose any more now. I'd never propose to you, even if I were free to
+do so, because I know you'd refuse me. You'd refuse me, wouldn't you?
+Somebody else might just as well have me, if you don't want me."
+
+[Sidenote: In Spite of Varied Resources]
+
+Yet in spite of the varied resources at woman's command, we sometimes
+hear of one who yearns for the privilege of seeking man in marriage. The
+woman who longs for the right to propose is evidently not bright enough
+to bring a man to the point.
+
+Still worse than this, there are cases on record where women, not
+reigning queens, have actually proposed to men. The men who are thus
+sought in the bonds of matrimony are not slow to tell of it, confining
+themselves usually to their own particular circle of men friends. But
+the news sometimes filters through man's capacity to keep a secret, and
+the knowledge is diffused among interested spinsters.
+
+[Sidenote: Hints]
+
+What men term "hints" are not out of place, for the proposal market
+would be less active, were it not for "hints." But these are seldom
+given in words--unless a man happens to be particularly stupid.
+
+When the proposal habit is not firmly fastened upon a man, and he begins
+to have serious designs upon some one girl, she knows it long before he
+does. Incidentally, the family and the neighbours have their suspicions.
+
+Woman, with her strong dramatic instinct, wishes the proposal to occur
+according to accepted rules. Hence, if a man shows symptoms of
+whispering the momentous question in a crowd, he is apt to be delicately
+discouraged, and if the girl is not satisfied with her own appearance,
+there will also be postponement. No girl wants to be proposed to when
+her hair is dishevelled, her collar wilted, and her soul distraught by
+pestiferous mosquitoes.
+
+But an ambitious and painstaking girl will arrange the stage for a
+proposal, with untiring patience, months before it actually happens.
+When she practices assiduously all the morning, that she may execute
+difficult passages with apparent ease in the evening, and willingly
+turns the freezer that there may be cooling ice opportunely left after
+dinner, to "melt if somebody doesn't eat it," she expects something to
+happen.
+
+When the man finally appears, and the little brother marches off like a
+well-trained soldier, with two nickels jingling in his pocket, even the
+victim might be on his guard. When the family are unceremoniously put
+out of the house, and father, mother, and sisters are seen in the summer
+twilight, wandering in disconsolate pairs, let the neighbours keep away
+from the house under penalty of the girl's lasting hate.
+
+Sometimes, when the family have been put out, and the common human
+interest leads intimate spinster friends to pass the house, there is
+nothing to be seen but the girl playing accompaniments for the man while
+he sings.
+
+Yet the initiated know, for if a girl only praises a man's singing
+enough, he will most surely propose to her before many moons have
+passed. The scheme has a two-fold purpose, because all may see that he
+finds the house attractive, and if no engagement is announced, the
+entire affair may easily be explained upon musical and platonic grounds.
+
+[Sidenote: A Formal Proposal]
+
+Owing to the distorted methods of courtship which prevail at the present
+day, a girl may never be sure that a man really cares for her until he
+makes a formal proposal. If a man were accepted the minute he proposed,
+he would think the girl had been his for some time, and would
+unconsciously class her as among those easily won.
+
+The insinuation that she has been easily won is the thing which is not
+to be borne. It may have been simple enough, in fact, but let a man
+beware how he trifles with this delicate subject, even after fifty years
+of marriage.
+
+[Sidenote: On Probation]
+
+Consequently, it is the proper thing to take the matter under advisement
+and never to accept definitely without a period of probation. This is
+the happiest time of a girl's life. She is absolutely sure of her lover
+and may administer hope, fear, doubt, and discouragement to her heart's
+content.
+
+The delicate attentions which are showered upon her are the envy of
+every spinster on the street who does not know the true state of the
+affair. Sometimes, with indifferent generosity, she divides her roses
+and invites the less fortunate to share her chocolates. This always
+pleases the man, if he knows about it.
+
+Also, because she is not in the least bound, she makes the best of this
+last freedom and accepts the same courtesies from other men. Nothing is
+so well calculated to sound the depths of original sin in man's nature,
+as to find his rival's roses side by side with his, when a girl has him
+on probation. And he never feels so entirely similar to an utter idiot,
+as when he sees a girl to whom he has definitely committed himself,
+flirting cheerfully with two or three other men.
+
+Woe be to him if he remonstrates! For Mademoiselle is testing him with
+this end in view. If he complains bitterly of her outrageous behaviour,
+she dismisses him with sorrowful dignity, jealousy being the one thing
+she cannot tolerate in men.
+
+[Sidenote: Opportunity for Fine Work]
+
+There is opportunity for fine work in the situation which the young
+woman immediately develops. A man may take his choice of the evils which
+lie before him, for almost anything may happen.
+
+He may complain, and if he shows anger, there is war. If he betrays
+jealousy, there is trouble which marriage will accentuate, rather than
+lessen. If he shows concern because his beloved is so fickle, and
+insinuates that so unstable a person will not make a good wife, he
+touches pride in a vital spot and his cause is no more. Let him be
+manfully unconcerned; as far above jealousy and angry reproach as a St.
+Bernard is above a kitten--and Mademoiselle is his.
+
+Philosophers laugh at woman's fickleness, but her constancy, when once
+awakened, endures beyond life and death, and sometimes beyond betrayal.
+But this is not to be won by a jealous man, for jealousy is the
+mother-in-law of selfishness, and a woman never permits a man to rival
+her in her own particular field.
+
+[Sidenote: Another Danger]
+
+If a man safely passes the test of probation, there is yet another
+danger which lies between him and the realisation of his ambition. This
+is the tendency of women to conduct excavations into a man's previous
+affairs.
+
+He needs the wisdom of the serpent at this juncture, for under the
+smiling sweetness a dagger is often concealed. If the point is allowed
+to show during an engagement, the whole blade will frequently flash
+during marriage.
+
+"Yes, dearest," a man will say, tenderly, "I have loved before, but that
+was long ago--long before I met you. She was beautiful, tall, dark,
+majestic, with a regal nature like herself--Good Heavens, how I loved
+her!"
+
+This is apt to continue for some little time, if a man gets thoroughly
+interested in his subject and thinks he is talking rather well, before
+he discovers that his petite blonde divinity is either a frozen statue,
+or a veritable Niobe as to tears. And not one man in three hundred and
+nineteen ever suspects what he has done!
+
+[Sidenote: The Thought of Defection]
+
+A woman is more jealous of the girls a man has loved, whom she has never
+seen, than of any number of attractive rivals. In the blind adoration
+which he yields her, she takes no thought of immediate defection, for
+her smile always makes him happy--her voice never loses its mystic power
+over his senses.
+
+On the contrary, a man never stoops to be jealous of the men who have
+pleaded in vain for what he has won, nor even of possible fiancés whom
+later discretion has discarded. He is sure of her at the present moment
+and his doubt centres itself comfortably upon the future, which is
+always shadowy and unreal to a man, because he is less imaginative than
+woman.
+
+And yet--there is no more dangerous companion for a woman than the man
+who has loved her. It is easier to waken a woman's old love than to
+teach her a new affection. Strangely enough, the woman a man has once
+loved and then forgotten is powerless in the after years. A man's dead
+friendship may dream of resurrection, but never his dead love.
+
+Jealousy and distrust have never yet won a doubting heart. Bitterness
+never accomplishes miracles which sweetness fails to do. Too often men
+and women spend their time in wondering why they are not loved, trying
+various schemes and pitiful experiments, and passing by the simple
+method of trying to be lovable and unconscious of self.
+
+[Sidenote: "The Milk of Human Kindness"]
+
+"The milk of human kindness" seldom produces cream, but there is only
+one way by which love may be won or kept. Perfection means a continual
+shifting of standards and must ever be unattainable, but the man or
+woman who is simply lovable will be wholly taken into other
+hearts--faults and all.
+
+Now and then a man's love is hopeless, from causes which are innate and
+beyond control. Sometimes regret strikes deep and lasts for more than a
+day, as in the pages of the story books which women love to read.
+Sometimes, too, a tender-hearted woman, seeing far into the future, will
+do her best to spare a fellow-creature pain.
+
+[Sidenote: The Wine of Conquest]
+
+But this is the exception, rather than the rule. The average woman
+regards a certain number of proposals as but a just tribute to her own
+charm. Sometimes she sees what she has unconsciously done when it is too
+late to retreat, but even then, though pity, regret, and honest pain
+may result from it, there is one effect more certain still--the
+intoxication of the wine of conquest, against which no woman is proof.
+
+
+
+
+Love Letters: Old and New
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Love Letters: Old and New
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Average Love Letter]
+
+The average love letter is sufficient to make a sensitive spinster weep,
+unless she herself is in love and the letter be addressed to her. The
+first stage of the tender passion renders a man careless as to his
+punctuation, the second seriously affects his spelling, and in the last
+period of the malady, his grammar develops locomotor ataxia. The single
+blessedness of school-teachers is largely to be attributed to this
+cause.
+
+A real love letter is absolutely ridiculous to everyone except the
+writer and the recipient. A composition, which repeats the same term of
+endearment thirteen times on a page, has certainly no particular claim
+to literary art.
+
+When a man writes a love letter, dated, and fully identified by name and
+address, there is no question but that he is in earnest. A large number
+of people consider nothing so innocently entertaining as love letters,
+read in a court-room, with due attention to effect, by the counsel for
+the other side.
+
+Affairs of that kind are given scarlet headlines in the saffron
+journals, and if the letters are really well done, it means the sale of
+an "extra." No man can hope to write anything which will possess such
+general interest as his love letters. If Shakespeare had written
+voluminously to his sweetheart--to any of his sweethearts--and the
+letters should be found by this generation, what a hue and cry would be
+raised over his peaceful ashes!
+
+[Sidenote: Sins of Commission]
+
+Doing the things which ought not to be done never loses fascination and
+charm. The rare pleasure thus obtained far exceeds the enjoyment of
+leaving undone things which ought to be done. Sins of commission are far
+more productive of happiness than the sins of omission.
+
+[Sidenote: For Posterity]
+
+Thus people whose sense of honour would not permit them to read an open
+letter which belonged to someone else will go by thousands to purchase
+the published letters of some famous man. Dr. Arbuthnot, in speaking of
+the publication of letters, said that it added a new terror to death, so
+true it is that while a man may think for the present, he unavoidably
+writes for posterity.
+
+No passion is too sacred to be hidden from the eagle eye of the public.
+The death of anyone of more than passing fame is followed by a volume of
+"letters." It is pathetic to read these posthumous pages, which should
+have been buried with the hands that wrote them, or consigned to the
+never-failing mercy of the flames.
+
+Burial has not always sufficed. The manuscript of one well-known book of
+poems was buried with the lady to whom they were written, but in later
+years her resting-place was disturbed, with the consent of her lover,
+for this very manuscript.
+
+Her golden hair had grown after her death, and was found closely
+entwined with the written pages--so closely that it had to be cut. The
+loving embrace which Death would not break was rudely forced to yield.
+Even in her "narrow house" she might not keep her love letters in peace,
+since the public wanted to read what had been written for her alone and
+the publisher was waiting for "copy."
+
+[Sidenote: Letters in a Grave]
+
+In a paper of the _Tatler_, written by Addison or Steele, or possibly
+by both, is described a party in a country village which is suddenly
+broken into confusion by the entrance of the sexton of their parish
+church, fresh from the digging of a grave. The sexton tells the
+merrymakers how a chance blow of his pickaxe has opened a decayed
+coffin, in which are discovered several papers.
+
+These are found to be the love letters received by the wife of Sir
+Thomas Chichley, one of the admirals of King William. Most of the
+letters were ruined by damp and mould, but "here and there," says the
+_Tatler_, "a few words such as 'my soul,' 'dearest,' 'roses,' and 'my
+angel,' still remained legible, resisting the corrupting influence of
+Time."
+
+One of these letters in a grave, which Lady Chichley had requested might
+be buried with her in her coffin, was found entire, though discoloured
+by the lapse of twenty years. Its words were these:
+
+"Madam:
+
+"If you would know the greatness of my love, consider that of your own
+beauty. That blooming countenance, that snowy bosom, that graceful
+person, return every moment to my imagination; the brightness of your
+eyes hindered me from closing mine since I last saw you. You may still
+add to your beauties by a smile. A frown will make me the most wretched
+of men, as I am the most passionate of lovers."
+
+[Sidenote: The Advertisement]
+
+Death is the advertisement, at the end of an autobiography, wherein
+people discover its virtues. The public which refused a bare subsistence
+to the living genius will make his children comfortable by generously
+purchasing his letters, which were never meant for them.
+
+The pathetic story of the inner struggle, which would have crucified the
+sensitive soul were it known to any save his dearest friends, is proudly
+blazoned forth--in print! Hopes and fears and trials are no longer
+concealed. Illness, poverty, and despair are given rubricated pages. The
+sorrowful letter to a friend, asking for five or ten dollars, is
+reproduced in facsimile.
+
+[Sidenote: The Soldier of the World]
+
+That it shows the human side of the genius is no excuse for the
+desecration. What of the sunny soul who always sang courage, while he
+himself was suffering from hope deferred! What of him who wrote in an
+attic, often hungry for his daily bread, and took care to give the
+impression of warmth and comfort! Why should his stern necessity be
+disclosed to the public that would not give him bread in return for his
+songs? It is enough to make the gallant soldier of the world turn
+uneasily in his grave.
+
+In this way a bit of the greatness so bravely won is often lost, and
+sometimes illusions are dispelled which all must regret. For years, we
+have read with delight Mrs. Browning's exquisite poem beginning:
+
+    "I have a name, a little name
+      Uncadenced for the ear."
+
+Throughout the poem there is no disclosure, but, so sure is her art,
+that there is no sense of loss or wonder. But the pitiless searchlight
+of the century is turned upon the Browning love letters, and thus we
+learn that Mrs. Browning's pet name was _Ba_!
+
+Pretty enough, perhaps, when spoken by a lover and a poet, or in shaded
+nooks, to the music of Italian streams, but quite unsuited to the
+present, even though it were to be read only by lovers equally fond.
+
+    "Though I write books, it will be read
+      Upon the page of none--"
+
+Poor Mrs. Browning! Little did she know!
+
+[Sidenote: With the Future in View]
+
+There have been some, no doubt, who have written with the future in
+view, though Abelard, who broke a woman's heart, could not have foreseen
+that his only claims to distinction would rest upon his letters to
+loving, faithful Héloise. The life which was to be too great for her to
+share is remembered now only because of her. Mocking Fate has brought
+the wronged woman an exquisite revenge.
+
+That delightful spendthrift and scapegrace, Richard Steele, has left a
+large number of whimsical letters, addressed to the lady he married. She
+might possibly object to their publication, but not Steele! Indeed, she
+was a foolish woman to keep this letter:
+
+"Dear Prue:
+
+"The afternoon coach will bring you ten pounds. Your letter shows that
+you are passionately in love with me. But we must take our portion of
+life without repining and I consider that good nature, added to the
+beautiful form God has given you, would make our happiness too great for
+human life. Your most obliged husband and most humble servant,
+
+    Rich. Steele."
+
+Alexander Pope was another who wrote for posterity. In spite of his
+deformity, he appears to have been touched to the heart by women, but
+vanity and selfishness tinged all of his letters.
+
+[Sidenote: Systematic Lovers]
+
+Robert Burns was a systematic lover of anything in petticoats, and has
+left such a mass of amatory correspondence that his biographer was
+sorely perplexed. There could not have been a pretty maid in the British
+Isles, to whom chance had been kind, who had not somewhere the usual
+packet of love letters from "Bobby" Burns.
+
+Laurence Sterne was no less generous with his affection, if the stories
+are true. At twenty, he fell in love with Elizabeth Lumley, and from his
+letters to her, one might easily fancy that love was a devastating and
+hopeless disease. There was a pretty little "Kitty" who claimed his
+devotion, and countless other affairs, before "Eliza" appeared. "Eliza"
+was a married woman and apparently the last love of the heart-scarred
+Sterne.
+
+[Sidenote: Left by the Dead]
+
+No earthly thing is so nearly immortal as a love letter, and nothing is
+so sorrowful as those left by the dead. The beautiful body may be dust
+and all but forgotten, while the work of the loving hands lives on. Even
+those written by the ancient Egyptians are seemingly imperishable. The
+clay tablet on which one of the Pharaohs wrote a love letter, asking the
+hand of a foreign princess, is to-day in the British Museum.
+
+The first time a woman cries after she is married, she reads over all
+the love letters the other men have written her, for a love letter is
+something a tender-hearted woman cannot bring herself to destroy.
+
+[Sidenote: The New Child]
+
+The love letters of the man she did not marry still possess lingering
+interest. The letters of many a successful man of affairs are still
+hidden in the treasure-box of the woman he loved, but did not marry.
+Both have formed other ties and children have risen up to call them
+blessed, or whatever the children may please, for even more dreadful
+than the new woman is the new child. Between them, they are likely to
+produce a new man.
+
+The new child is apt to find the letters and read them aloud to the
+wrong people, being most successfully unexpected and inopportune. A box
+of old letters, distributed sparingly at the doors of mutual friends, is
+the distinguishing feature of a lovely game called "playing postman."
+Social upheavals have occurred from so small a cause as this.
+
+It sometimes happens, too, that when a girl has promised to marry a man
+and the wedding day is set, she receives from a mutual friend a package
+of faded letters and a note which runs something like this:
+
+"My Dear:
+
+"Now that my old friend's wedding day is approaching, I feel that I have
+no longer the right to keep his letters. They are too beautiful and
+tender to be burned and I have not the heart to make that disposition of
+them. Were I to return them to him, he would doubtless toss them into
+the fire, and I cannot bear to have them lost.
+
+"So, after thinking about it for some time, I have concluded to send
+them to you, who are the rightful keeper of his happiness, as well as of
+his letters. I trust that you may find a place for these among those
+which he has addressed to you. Wishing you all happiness in the future,
+believe me to be
+
+"Very sincerely and affectionately yours."
+
+[Sidenote: On the Firing Line]
+
+The dainty and appropriate wedding gift is not often shown to the happy
+man, but every page and every line is carefully read. Now and then the
+bride-elect advances boldly to the firing line and writes a letter of
+thanks after this fashion:
+
+"It is very sweet and thoughtful of you, my dear friend, to send me the
+letters. Of course I shall keep them in with mine, though I have but
+few, for the dear boy has never been able to leave me for more than a
+day, since first we met.
+
+"Long before we became engaged, he made me a present of your letters to
+him, which he said were well worth the reading, and indeed, I have
+found them so. I shall arrange them according to date and sequence,
+though I observe that you have written much more often than he--I
+suppose because we foolish women can never say all we want to in one
+letter and are compelled to add postscripts, sometimes days apart.
+
+"Believe me, I fully appreciate your wishes for our happiness. I trust
+you may come to us often and see how your hopes are fulfilled. With many
+thanks for your loving thought of me, as ever,
+
+Affectionately yours."
+
+[Sidenote: If a Girl is in Love]
+
+If a girl is in love, she carries the last letter inside her shirt-waist
+in the day time, and puts it under her pillow at night, thereby
+expecting dreams of the beloved.
+
+But the dispenser of nocturnal visions delights in joking, and though
+impalpable arms may seem to surround the sleeping spinster and a tender
+kiss may be imprinted upon her lips, it is not once in seventeen days
+that the caresses are bestowed by the writer of the letter. It is a
+politician whose distorted picture has appeared in the evening paper,
+some man the girl despises, the postman, or worse yet, the tramp who has
+begged bread at the door.
+
+[Sidenote: When a Man is in Love]
+
+When a man is in love, he carries the girl's last letter in his pocket
+until he has answered it and has another to take its place. He stoops to
+no such superstition as placing it under his pillow. Neither is it read
+as often as his letters to her.
+
+A woman never really writes to the man she loves. She simply records her
+fleeting moods--her caprice, her tenderness, and her dreams. Because of
+this, she is often misunderstood. If the letter of to-day is different
+from that of yesterday, her lover, in his heart at least, accuses her of
+fickleness.
+
+A man's letters to a girl are very frequently shown to her most intimate
+friend, if they are sufficiently ardent, but a man never shows the
+letters of a woman he truly cares for, unless he feels the need of some
+other masculine intellect to assist him in comprehending the lady of his
+heart.
+
+"Nothing feeds the flame like a letter. It has intent, personality,
+secrecy." But that is love indeed which stands the test of long
+separation--and letters.
+
+[Sidenote: A Single Drop of Ink]
+
+With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the old Egyptian sorcerer
+promised to reveal the past and foretell the future. The single drop of
+ink with which a lover writes may sadly change the blissful future of
+which he dreams.
+
+The written word is so sadly different from that which is spoken! The
+malicious demon concealed in the ink bottle delights in wrecking love.
+Misunderstandings and long silences follow in rapid succession,
+tenderness changes to coldness, and love to bitter regret.
+
+Someone has said that the true test of congeniality is not a matter of
+tastes, but of humour. If two people find the same things amusing, their
+comradeship is a foregone conclusion, but even so, it requires unusual
+insight to distinguish the playful parts of a letter from the serious
+passages. If the separated lovers would escape the pit of destruction,
+let all jokes be plainly marked with a cross or a star.
+
+A letter is an unfair thing. It follows its own mood blindly without
+reference to others. If penned in sadness it often makes a sunny day a
+cloudy one, and if written in jest it may be as inopportune as mirth at
+a funeral.
+
+[Sidenote: Misunderstood]
+
+A letter betraying anger and hurt pride may often crystallise a yielding
+mood into determination and summon evil spirits which love cannot
+banish. The letter asking forgiveness may cross the path of the one
+which puts an end to everything. It would seriously test the power of
+the Egyptian to foretell what might result from a single letter, written
+in all love and tenderness, perhaps, but destined to be completely
+misunderstood.
+
+Old love letters often mean tears, because they have been so wrongly
+read. Later years, with fine irony, sometimes bring new understanding of
+the loving heart behind the faulty lines. After all, it is the
+inexpressible atmosphere of a letter which is felt, rather than the
+meaning which the phrases ostensibly convey.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Postman]
+
+Tender secrets are concealed in the weather-worn bag of the postman. The
+lovers may hide their hearts from all but him. Parents, guardians, and
+even mature maiden aunts may be successfully diverted, but not the
+postman!
+
+He knows that the girl who eagerly watches for him in the morning has
+more than a passing interest in the mail. He knows where her lover is,
+how often he writes, when she should have a letter, and whether all is
+well.
+
+Sometimes, too, he knows that it is better to take a single letter to
+the house three or four times in succession, rather than to leave it in
+the hands of one to whom it is not addressed.
+
+Blessed be the countless Cupids in the uniform of the postal service!
+The little blind god is wont to assume strange forms, apparently at
+will. But no stern parent could suspect that his sightless eyes were
+concealed behind the spectacles of a sedate postman, nor that his wicked
+arrows were hidden under piles of letters.
+
+The uninitiated wonder "what there is to write about." A man may have
+seen a girl the evening before, and yet a bulky letter comes in the
+afternoon. And what mysterious interest can make one write three or four
+times a week?
+
+Where is the girl whose love letter was left in pawn because she could
+not find her purse? The grizzled veteran never collects the "two cents
+due" on the love letters that are a little overweight. He would not put
+a value upon anything so precious, and he is seldom a cynic--perhaps
+because, more than anyone else, he is the dispenser of daily joy.
+
+The reading of old love letters is in some way associated with
+hair-cloth trunks, mysterious attics, and rainy days. The writers may be
+unknown and the hands that laid them away long since returned to dust,
+but the interest still remains.
+
+[Sidenote: Dead Roses]
+
+Dead roses crumble to ashes in the gentle fingers that open the long
+folded pages--the violets of a forgotten spring impart a delicate
+fragrance to the yellowed spot on which they lay. The ink is faded and
+the letter much worn, as though it had lain next to some youthful
+breast, to be read in silence and solitude until the tender words were
+graven upon the heart in the exquisite script of Memory.
+
+The phrasing has a peculiar quaintness, old fashioned, perhaps, but with
+a grace and dignity all its own. Through the formal, stately sentences
+the hidden sweetness creeps like the crimson vine upon the autumn
+leaves. Brave hearts they had, those lovers of the past, who were making
+a new country in the wilderness, and yet there was an unsuspected
+softness--the other "soul side" which even a hero may have, "to show a
+woman when he loves her."
+
+There are other treasures to be found with the letters--old
+daguerreotypes, in ornate cases, showing the girlish, sweet face of her
+who is a grandmother now, or perhaps a soldier in the trappings of war,
+the first of a valiant line.
+
+There are songs which are never sung, save as a quavering lullaby to
+some mite who will never remember the tune, and fragments of nocturnes
+or simple melodies, which awaken the past as surely as the lost shell
+brings to the traveller inland the surge and thunder of the distant sea.
+
+[Sidenote: The Mysteries of Life and Death]
+
+All the mysteries of life and death are woven in with the letters; those
+pathetic remembrances which the years may fade but never destroy. There
+are old school books, dog-eared and musty, scraps of rich brocade and
+rustling taffeta, the yellowed sampler which was the daily trial of
+some little maid, and the first white robe of someone who has grown
+children of his own.
+
+[Sidenote: Memory's Singing]
+
+Give Memory an old love letter and listen to her singing. There is quiet
+at first, as though she were waiting for some step to die away, or some
+childish laughter to cease. Then there is a hushed arpeggio, struck from
+strings which are old and worn, but sweet and tender still.
+
+Sometimes the song is of an old farmhouse on the western plains, where
+life meant struggle and bitter privation. Brothers and sisters, in the
+torn, faded clothes which were all they had; father's tremulous "God
+bless you," when someone went away. Mother's never-ending toil, and the
+day when her roughened hands were crossed upon her breast, at rest for
+the first time, while the children cried in wonder and fear.
+
+Then the plaintive minor swells for a moment into the full major chord,
+when Love, the King, in royal purple, took possession of the desolate
+land. Corn huskings and the sound of "Money Musk," scarlet ears and
+stolen kisses under the harvest moon, youth and laughter, and the
+eternal, wavering hope for better things. Long years of toil, with
+interludes of peace and divine content, little voices, and sometimes a
+little grave. Separation and estrangement, trust and misgiving,
+heartache and defeat.
+
+[Sidenote: A Magic in the Strings]
+
+The tears may start at Memory's singing, but as the song goes on there
+comes peace, for there is a magic in the strings which changes sadness
+into something sweet. Memory's eyes are deep and tender and her heart is
+full of compassion. So the old love letters bring happiness after
+all--like the smile which sometimes rests upon the faces of the dead.
+
+
+
+
+An Inquiry into Marriage
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+An Inquiry into Marriage
+
+
+[Sidenote: Like a Grape]
+
+Marriage appears to be somewhat like a grape. People swallow a great
+deal of indifferent good for the sake of the lurking bit of sweetness
+and never know until it is too late whether the venture was wise.
+
+Chaucer compared it to a crowded church. Those left on the outside are
+eager to get in, and those caught inside are straining every nerve to
+get out. There are many, in this year of grace, who have safely made
+their escape, but, unfortunately, the happy ones inside say little about
+it, and do not seem anxious to get out.
+
+Fate takes great pleasure in confusing the inquiring spinster. Some of
+the disappointed ones will advise her never to attempt it, and in the
+voluble justification which follows, she sees clearly that the discord
+was not entirely caused by the other. Her friends, who have been married
+a year or so, regard her with evident pity, and occasionally suggest,
+delicately enough, to be sure, that she could never have had a proposal.
+
+[Sidenote: The Consistent Lady]
+
+Among her married friends who are more mature, there is usually one who
+chooses her for a confidant. This consistent lady will sob out her
+unhappiness on the girl's shoulder, and the next week ask her why she
+doesn't get married. Sometimes she invites the girl to her house to meet
+some new and attractive man--with the memory of those bitter tears still
+in her heart.
+
+A girl often loses a friend by heartily endorsing the things the weeper
+says of her husband. The fact that he is an inconsiderate brute is
+frequently confided to the kindly surface of a clean shirt-waist,
+regardless of laundry bills. The girl remarks dispassionately that she
+has noticed it; that he never considers the happiness of his wife, and
+she doesn't see how the tearful one stands it. Behold the instant and
+painful transformation! It is very hard to be a popular spinster when
+one has many married friends.
+
+That interesting pessimist, Herr Arthur Schopenhauer, advocates
+universal polygamy upon the theory that all women would thus be
+supported. To the unprejudiced observer who reads the comic papers and
+goes to afternoon receptions, it would seem that each woman should have
+several husbands, to pay her bills and see that she is suitably escorted
+to various social affairs.
+
+[Sidenote: Seven Husbands]
+
+If a woman had seven husbands, for instance, it is possible that some
+one of them would be willing to take her out whenever she wanted to go.
+If she yearned for a sealskin coat or a diamond pin and no one of them
+was equal to the occasion, a collection could be taken up. Two or three
+might contribute to the good cause and be so beautifully rewarded with
+smiles and favourite dishes that the remainder of the husbands would be
+inspired to do something in the same line.
+
+At least five of them could go out every night in the week. The matter
+could be arranged according to a simple system of rotation, or they
+might draw lots. There could be a club-room in the house, where they
+might smoke without affecting the curtains and Madam's temper. Politics
+and poker make more widows than war, but no woman could find it in her
+heart to object to the innocent pastime under such happy circumstances,
+because she would be deprived of nothing--not even her husband's
+society. Six of them might play, while the other read to their wife, and
+those who won could buy some lovely new china for the house.
+
+The sweetness of the lady of their several hearts would be increased
+seven-fold, while her frowns would be equally divided among them. There
+would be a large and enviable freedom accorded everyone. There would
+always be enough at home so dinner need not wait, and Madam would be
+spared one great annoyance. If the servants left suddenly, as is not
+unusual, there would be men enough to cook a dinner Epicurus might envy,
+each one using his own chafing-dish. Men make better cooks than women
+because they put so much more feeling into it.
+
+The spirit of gentle rivalry, which would thus be developed, is well
+worth considering. Some one of the seven would always be a lover. To
+sustain the old relation continuously after marriage undoubtedly
+requires gifts of tact and temperament which are not often vouchsafed
+to men, and this would not prove so irksome if the tender obligation
+were shared. Marriage would no longer be the cold potato of love.
+
+Different men always admire different qualities of the same woman, and
+the beauty of the much-married lady would be developed far beyond that
+of her who had only one husband, because a recognised virtue is
+stimulated.
+
+If a man admires a woman's teeth, she gets new kinds of dentifrice and
+constantly endeavours to add to their whiteness. If he speaks
+approvingly of her hair, various tonics are purchased. If he alludes to
+her mellow voice, she tries conscientiously to make it more beautiful
+still.
+
+There is a suspected but not verified relation between a man's affection
+and his digestion. With this ideal method of marriage in force, the
+dyspeptics could go off by themselves until they felt better, and not be
+bothered with tender inquiries concerning their health. If the latch key
+unaccountably refused to work at two o'clock in the morning, some other
+member of the husband could always assist the absent ones in, and Madam
+would never know how many were late.
+
+[Sidenote: The Financial Burden]
+
+The financial burden would indeed be light. The household expenses might
+be divided equally and relieving the wife's necessities would be the
+happiness of all. One might assume the responsibility of her gowns,
+another of her hats and gloves, another might keep her supplied with
+bonbons, matinée tickets, flowers, and silk stockings, another might
+attend to her jackets and her club dues, her jewels might be the care of
+another, and so on. It would be the joy of all of them to see their
+peerless wife well dressed, and when she wanted anything in particular,
+she need only smile sweetly upon the one whose happy lot it was to have
+charge of that department of expense.
+
+There would be no friction, no discord. Madam would be blissfully
+content, and men have claimed for years that they could live together
+much more amicably than women, and that they never quarrel among
+themselves, save in rare instances. This, they say, is because they are
+so liberal in their views, but a great many men are so broad-minded that
+it makes their heads flat.
+
+It is strange that this happy form of polygamy did not occur to Herr
+Schopenhauer. It may be because he was a pessimist--and a man.
+
+[Sidenote: The Most Nervous Time]
+
+The most nervous time of a man's life is the day of his wedding. The
+bachelors and benedicts give different reasons for this when they are
+gently approached upon the subject, but the majority admit, with lovable
+and refreshing conceit, that it is because of their innate modesty and
+their aversion to conspicuous prominence.
+
+If this is truly the reason, the widespread fear may be much lessened,
+for in the grand matrimonial pageant, the man is the most obscure member
+of the procession. People are not apt to think of him at all until the
+ceremony is over and the girl has a new name. What he wears is of no
+consequence, and he has no wedding gifts, though he may be remembered
+for a moment if he gives a diamond star to the bride. Yet it is this
+ceremony which changes him from a vassal to a king. Before marriage he
+is a low and useless trump, but afterward he is ace high in the game.
+
+[Sidenote: A Trip Down Town]
+
+A latter-day philosopher has beautifully likened marriage to a trip
+down-town. A man leaves the house in the morning, his mind already
+active concerning the affairs of the day. His newspaper is in his
+pocket, he has plenty of time to reach the office, and his breakfast has
+begun to assimilate. Suddenly he sees a yellow speck on the horizon.
+
+He calculates the distance to the corner and quickens his pace, his eyes
+nobly fixed meanwhile upon the goal of his ambition. Anxiety develops,
+then fear. At last he surrenders all dignity and gallops madly toward
+the approaching car, with his coat tails spread to the morning breeze
+and tears in his eyes. Out of breath, but triumphant, he swings on just
+as farther pursuit seemed well-nigh hopeless.
+
+Does he stop to chat cheerily with the conductor? Does he dwell upon the
+luxurious aspect of his conveyance? Does the comfort which he has just
+secured fill his heart with gladness? Does the plush covering of the
+seat appeal to his æsthetic sense? No mere woman may ever hope to know,
+for he grudgingly gives the conductor five pennies, one of them badly
+battered and the date beaten out of it--and devotes himself to his
+paper.
+
+[Sidenote: The Masculine Mental Process]
+
+The thing which appears unattainable is ever desired by man. A girl who
+wears an engagement ring upon her finger has a charm for which the
+unattached sigh in vain. The masculine mental process in such a case,
+briefly summarised, is something like this.
+
+I. "Wonder who that girl is over there? Red hair and quite a bit of
+style. Never cared much for red hair--suppose she's got freckles too.
+Now she's coming this way. Why, there's a solitaire on her finger; she's
+engaged. Well, he can have her--I won't cut him out. Wonder who she is!
+
+II. "Really, she isn't so bad--I've seen worse. She knows how to dress,
+and she hasn't so many freckles. Brown eyes--that means temper when
+associated with red hair. Must be quite a little trick to tame a girl
+like that. She doesn't look as though she were quite subdued.
+
+III. "He probably doesn't know how to manage her. I could train her all
+right. I wouldn't mind doing it; I haven't anything much on hand in the
+girl line. So that's the cad she's engaged to? Poor little girl!
+
+IV. "I feel sorry for that girl, I honestly do. She's throwing herself
+away. She can't love that fellow. She'll get over it when she's married,
+and be miserable all the rest of her life. I suppose I ought to save her
+from him. I think I'll talk to her about it, but it will have to be done
+cautiously.
+
+V. "Fine young woman, that. Broad-minded, bright, vivacious, and not
+half bad to look at. Seemed to take my advice in good part. Those great,
+deep brown eyes are pathetic. That's the kind of a girl to be shielded
+and guarded from all the hard knocks in the world.
+
+VI. "The more I see of that girl, the more I think of her. Those Frenchy
+touches of dress and that superb red hair make her beautiful. I always
+did like red hair. Honestly, I think she's the prettiest girl I ever
+saw. And her womanliness matches her beauty. Any man might be proud of
+winning a girl like that.
+
+VII. "The irony of Fate! The one soul in all the universe that is deep
+enough to comprehend mine, the peerless queen of womankind, she for
+whom I have waited all my life, is pledged to another! I shall go mad if
+I bear this any longer. I simply must have her. 'All is fair in love and
+war'--I'll go and ask her!"
+
+[Sidenote: Gold-Brick Tactics]
+
+When one man alludes to another as a "confidence man," it is no
+distinguishing mark, for they instinctively adopt gold-brick tactics
+when seeking woman in marriage.
+
+Those exquisite hands shall never perform a single menial task! Yet,
+after marriage, Her Ladyship finds that she is expected to be a cook,
+nurse, housekeeper, seamstress, chambermaid, waitress, and practical
+plumber. This is an unconscious tribute to the versatility of woman,
+since a man thinks he does well if he is a specialist in any one line.
+
+Her slightest wish shall be his law! Yet not only are wishes of no
+avail, but even pleading and prayer fall upon deaf ears. It will be his
+delight to see that she wants for nothing, yet she is reduced to the
+necessity of asking for money--even for carfare--and a man will do for
+his bicycle what his wife would ask in vain.
+
+Many of the matrimonial infelicities of which both men and women
+bitterly complain may be traced to the gold-brick delusion. A woman
+marries in the hope of having a lover and discovers, too late, that she
+merely has a boarder who is most difficult to please.
+
+[Sidenote: A Certain Pitiful Change]
+
+There is a certain pitiful change which comes with marriage. The sound
+of her voice would thrill him to his finger-tips, the touch of her hand
+make his throat ache, and the light in her eyes set the blood to singing
+in his veins. With possession, ecstasy changes to content, and the
+loving woman, dreaming that she may again find what she has so strangely
+lost, tries to waken the old feeling by pathetic little ways which women
+read at once, but men never know anything about.
+
+In a way, woman is to blame, but not so much. Her superior insight
+should give her a better understanding of courtship. A man may mean what
+he says--at the time he says it--but men and seasons change.
+
+[Sidenote: Value and Proportion]
+
+The happiness of the after-years depends largely upon her sense of value
+and proportion. No woman of artistic judgment would crowd her rooms
+with bric-à-brac, even though comfort were not lacking. Pictures hung
+together so closely that the frames touch lose beauty. Space has
+distinct value, and solid colours, judiciously used, create a harmony
+impossible to obtain by the continuous use of figured fabrics.
+
+Yet many a woman whose house is a model of taste, whose rooms are
+spacious and restful, insists upon crowding her marriage with the
+bric-à-brac of violent affection. She is not content with undecorated
+spaces; with interludes of friendship and the appreciation which is
+felt, rather than spoken. She demands the constant assurances, the
+unfailing devotion of the lover, and thus loses her atmosphere--and her
+content.
+
+It seems to be a settled thing that men shall do the courting before
+marriage and women afterward. Nobody writes articles on "How to Make a
+Wife Happy," and the innumerable cook books, like an army of
+grasshoppers, consume and devastate the land.
+
+If women did not demand so much, men in general would be more
+thoughtful. If it were understood that even after marriage man was
+still to be the lover, the one who sent roses to his sweetheart would
+sometimes bring them to his wife. The pretty courtesies would not so
+often be forgotten.
+
+[Sidenote: The Tender Thought]
+
+If the tender thought were in some way shown, and the loving word which
+leaps to the lips were never forced back, but always spoken, marriage
+and even life itself would take on new beauty and charm. If a woman has
+daily evidence of a man's devotion, no matter in how small a way, her
+hunger and thirst for love are bountifully assuaged. Misunderstandings
+rapidly grow into coldness and neglect, and foolish woman, blind with
+love, adopts retribution and recrimination as her weapons. There are a
+great many men who love their wives simply because they know they would
+be scalped if they didn't.
+
+Making an issue of a little thing is one of the surest ways to spoil
+happiness. One's personal pride is felt to be vitally injured by
+surrender, but there is no quality of human nature so nearly royal as
+the ability to yield gracefully. It shows small confidence in one's own
+nature to fear that compromise lessens self-control. To consider
+constantly the comfort and happiness of another is not a sign of
+weakness but of strength.
+
+[Sidenote: Spoiled Children]
+
+Too many men and women are only spoiled children at heart. The little
+maid of five or six takes her doll and goes home because her playmates
+have been unkind. Twenty years later she packs her trunk and goes to her
+mother's because of some quarrel which had an equally childish
+beginning.
+
+But the hurts of the after-years are not so easily healed. The children
+kiss and make up no later than the next day, but, grown to manhood and
+womanhood, they consider it far beneath their dignity and importance to
+say "Forgive me," and thus proceed to the matrimonial garbage box by way
+of the divorce court.
+
+Lovers are wont to consider a marriage license a free ticket to
+Paradise. Sometimes happiness may be freely given by the dispenser of
+earthly blessings, but it is more often bought. It is a matter of
+temperament rather than circumstance, and is to be had only by the two
+who work for it together, forgiving, forgetting, graciously yielding,
+and looking forward to the perfect understanding which will surely
+come.
+
+Matches are not all made in heaven. Even the parlour variety sometimes
+smell of brimstone, and Cupid is blamed for many which are made by
+cupidity. The gossips and the busybodies would die of mal-nutrition were
+it not for marriage and its complications.
+
+[Sidenote: The Tabbies]
+
+Two people who have quarrelled cheerfully before marriage and whose
+engagement has been broken three or four times often surprise the
+tabbies who prophesy misfortune by settling down into post-nuptial
+content. Two who are universally pronounced to be "perfectly suited to
+each other" are soon absolutely miserable. Marriage is the one thing
+which everyone knows more about than people who are intimately
+concerned.
+
+[Sidenote: "Unequal Marriages"]
+
+We hear a great deal of "unequal marriages," not merely in degree of
+fortune, but in taste and mental equipment. A man steeped to his
+finger-tips in the lore of the ancients chooses a pretty butterfly who
+does not know the difference between a hieroglyph and a Greek verb, and
+to whom Rome and Carthage are empty names. His friends predict misery,
+and wonder at his blindness in passing by the young woman of equal
+outward charm who delivered a scholarly thesis at her commencement and
+has the degree of Master of Arts.
+
+A talented woman marries a man without proportionate gifts and the
+tabbies call a special session. It is decided at this conclave that "she
+is throwing herself away and will regret it." To everyone's surprise,
+she is occasionally very happy with the man she has chosen, though about
+some things of no particular importance she knows much more than he.
+
+The law of compensation is as certain in its action as that of
+gravitation, though it is not so widely understood. Nature demands
+balance and equality. She is constantly chiselling at the mountain to
+lower it to the level of the plain, and welding heterogeneous elements
+into homogeneous groups.
+
+[Sidenote: The Certain Instinct]
+
+The pretty butterfly may easily prove a balance wheel to the man of much
+wisdom. She will add a vivid human interest to his abstract pursuits and
+keep him from growing narrow-minded. He chose the element he needed to
+make him symmetrical, with the certain instinct which impels isolated
+atoms of hydrogen and oxygen to combine in the proportion of two to one.
+
+It never occurs to the tabbies that no talent or facility can ever
+stifle a woman's nature. The simple need of her heart is never taken
+into account in the criticism of these marriages which are deemed
+"unequal." If a woman holds an assistant professorship of mathematics in
+a university, it is a foregone conclusion that she should fall in love
+with someone who is proficient in trigonometry and holds his tangents
+and cosines in high esteem. Happy evenings could then be spent with a
+book of logarithms and sheets of paper specially cut to accommodate a
+problem.
+
+Similarity of tastes may sometimes prove an attraction, but very seldom
+similarity of pursuit. Musicians do not often intermarry, and artists
+and writers are more apt to choose each other than exponents of their
+own cult.
+
+[Sidenote: Appreciation and Accomplishment]
+
+It is not surprising if a man who is passionately fond of music falls in
+love with a woman who has a magnificent voice, or a power which amounts
+to magic over the strings of her violin. Appreciation is as essential
+to happiness as accomplishment, and when the two are balanced in
+marriage, comradeship is inevitable. An artist may marry a woman who
+does not understand his pictures, but if she had not appreciated him in
+ways more vital to his happiness, there would have been no marriage.
+
+It is pathetic to see what marriage sometimes is, compared with what it
+might be--to see it degraded to the level of a business transaction when
+it was meant to be infinitely above the sordid touch of the dollar and
+the dime. It is a perverted instinct which leads one to marry for money,
+for it will not buy happiness, though it may secure an imitation which
+pleases some people for a little while.
+
+There is nothing so beautiful as a girl's dream of her marriage, and
+nothing so sad as the same girl, if Time brings her disillusion instead
+of the true marriage which is "a mutual concord and agreement of souls,
+a harmony in which discord is not even imagined; the uniting of two
+mornings that hope to reach the night together."
+
+The world is full of pain and danger for those who face it alone, and
+home, that sanctuary where one may find strength and new courage, must
+be built upon a foundation of mutual helpfulness and trust. No one can
+make a home alone. It needs a man's strong hands, a woman's tender
+hands, and two true hearts.
+
+[Sidenote: The Light upon the Altar]
+
+The light which shines upon the bridal altar is either the white flame
+of eternal devotion or the sacrificial fire which preys hungrily upon
+someone's disappointment and someone's broken heart. But to the utter
+rout of the cynic, the dream which led the two souls thither sometimes
+becomes divinely true.
+
+Marriage is said to be sufficient "career" for any woman, and it is
+equally true of men. Like Emerson's vision of friendship, it is fit "not
+only for serene days and pleasant rambles, but for all the passages of
+life and death."
+
+It is to make one the stronger because one does not have to go alone. It
+is to make one's joy the sweeter because it is shared. It is to take the
+sting away from grief because it is divided, and the dear comfort of the
+other's love lies forever around the sore and doubting heart.
+
+[Sidenote: Fire and Snow]
+
+It is to be the light in the darkness, the belief in the distrust, the
+never-failing source of consolation. It is to be the gentlest of
+forgiveness for all of one's mistakes--strength and tenderness, passion
+and purity, the fire and the snow.
+
+It is to make one generous to all the world with one's sympathy and
+compassion, because in the sanctuary there is no lack of love. It is
+"the joining together of two souls for life, to strengthen each other in
+all peril, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each
+other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable
+memories at the moment of the last parting."
+
+
+
+
+The Physiology of Vanity
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+The Physiology of Vanity
+
+
+[Sidenote: Conceit and Vanity]
+
+"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!" It is the common human emotion, the
+root of the personal equation, the battling residuum in the last
+analysis of social chemistry. There is a wide difference between conceit
+and vanity. Conceit is lovable and unconcealed; vanity is supreme
+selfishness, usually hidden. Conceit is based upon an unselfish desire
+to please; vanity takes no thought of others which is not based upon
+egotism.
+
+Vanity and jealousy are closely allied, while conceit is a natural
+development of altruistic virtue. Conceit is the mildest of vices;
+vanity is the worst. Men are usually conceited but infrequently vain,
+while women are seldom afflicted with the lesser vice.
+
+Man's conceit is the simplest form of self-appreciation. He thinks he is
+extremely good-looking, as men go; that he has seen the world; that he
+is a good judge of dinners and of human nature; that he is one of the
+few men who may easily charm a woman.
+
+The limits of man's conceit are usually in full view, but eye nor
+opera-glass has not yet approached the end of woman's vanity. The
+disease is contagious, and the men who suffer from it are usually those
+whose chosen companions are women.
+
+Woman's vanity is a development of her insatiate thirst for love. Her
+smiles and tears are all-powerful with her lover, and nothing goes so
+quickly to a woman's head as a sense of power. She forever defies the
+Salic law--each woman feels that her rightful place is upon a throne.
+
+[Sidenote: The One Object]
+
+The one object of woman's life is the acquirement of power through love.
+It is because this power is freely recognised by the men who seek her in
+marriage that her vanity seldom has full scope until after she is
+married.
+
+[Sidenote: The Destroyer]
+
+After marriage, a great many women begin the slow process of alienating
+a man from his family, blind to the fact that by lessening his love for
+others, they add nothing to their own store. The filial and fraternal
+love is not to be given to anyone but mother and sisters--they have no
+place in a man's heart that another woman could fill. The destroyer
+simply obliterates that part of his life and offers nothing in its
+place.
+
+The achievement sometimes takes years, but it is none the less sure.
+Later, it may be extended to father and brothers, but they are always
+the last to be considered.
+
+It is most difficult of all to break the tie which binds a man to his
+mother. The one who bore him is not faultless, for motherhood brings new
+gifts of feeling, sometimes sacrificing judgment and clear vision to
+selfish unselfishness. It is only in fiction and poetry that such love
+is valued now, for the divine blindness which does not question, which
+asks only the right to give, has lost beauty in our age of reason and
+restraint.
+
+He had thought that face the most beautiful in all the world--until he
+fell in love. Now he sees his mother as she is; a wrinkled old woman,
+perverse, unreasonable, and inclined to meddle with his domestic
+affairs. The hands that soothed his childish fretting are no longer
+lovely. Inattention to small details of dress, which he never noticed
+before, are painfully evident. The eyes that have watched him all his
+life with loving anxiety, shining with pride at his success and
+softening with tenderest pity at his mistakes, are subtly different now.
+He wonders at his blindness. It is strange, indeed, that he has not
+realised all this before.
+
+[Sidenote: The Awakening]
+
+To most men the awakening comes too late if it comes at all. Only when
+the faded eyes are closed and the worn hands folded forever; when
+"mother" is beyond the reach of praise or blame, her married boy
+realises what has been done. With that first shock comes bitterest
+repentance--and he never forgives his wife. Many a woman who complains
+of "coldness" and "lost love" might trace it back to the day her
+husband's mother died, and to the sudden flash of insight, the
+adjustment of relation, which comes with death.
+
+The comic papers have made the mother-in-law a thing to be dreaded. She
+is the poster attached to the matrimonial magazine which inspires
+would-be purchasers with awe. Many an engaged girl confides to her best
+friend that her fiancé's mother is "an old cat." She usually goes still
+further, and gives jealousy as the cause of it.
+
+No right-minded mother was ever jealous of the woman her son chose for
+his wife. But she has seen how marriage changes men and naturally fears
+the result. The altar is the grave of many a boy's love for his mother.
+Neither of the women most intimately concerned is blind to the impending
+possibilities; it is only man who cannot see.
+
+[Sidenote: One in a Thousand]
+
+There are some girls who realise what it means, but they are few and far
+between. One in a thousand, perhaps, will openly acknowledge her debt to
+the woman who for twenty-five or thirty years has given her best thought
+to the man she is about to marry.
+
+Is he strong and active, healthy and finely moulded? It is his mother's
+care for the first sixteen years of his life. It is the result of her
+anxious days and of many a sleepless night, while the potential man was
+racked with fever and childish ills. His chivalrous devotion to the girl
+he loves is wholly due to his mother's influence. His clean and
+open-hearted manliness is a free gift to her, from the woman now
+characterised as "an old cat."
+
+It is seldom that the mother receives credit for his virtues, but she is
+invariably blamed for his faults. Too many women expect a man to be cut
+out by their pattern. The supreme mental achievement is the ability to
+judge other people by their own standards, and a crank is not
+necessarily a person whose rules of life and conduct do not coincide
+with our own.
+
+[Sidenote: The Thirst for Power]
+
+To this thirst for power may be traced all of woman's vanity. It is
+commonly supposed that she dresses to please others, but she often
+values fine raiment principally because it shows how much her husband
+thinks of her. If a man's coat is shiny at the seams and he postpones
+the new one that his wife may have an extra hat, she is delicately
+flattered by this unselfish tribute to her charm.
+
+From a single root vanity spreads and flowers until its poisonous blooms
+affect all social life. A woman becomes vain of her house, her rugs, her
+tapestries, her jewels, horses, and even of the livery of her footman.
+The things which should be valued for their intrinsic beauty and the
+pleasure-giving quality, which is not by any means selfish, soon become
+food for a vice.
+
+She gradually grows to consider herself a very superior person. She is
+so charming and so much to be desired, that some man works night and day
+in his office, sacrificing both pleasure and rest, that she may have the
+baubles for which she yearns.
+
+It is not far from absolute self-satisfaction, in either man or woman,
+to generous bestowal of enlightenment upon the unfortunate savages who
+linger on the outskirts of one's social sphere.
+
+In the infinite vastness of creation, where innumerable worlds move
+according to the fiat of majestic Law, there lies one called Earth.
+There are planets within reach of the scientific vision of its
+inhabitants that are many times larger. There are some which have more
+moons, more mountains and rivers, longer days, and longer years.
+Countless suns, the centres of other vast planetary systems, lie in the
+inconceivable distances beyond.
+
+[Sidenote: A Mote in the Sun]
+
+In the midst of this unspeakable greatness, Earth swings like one of the
+motes which a passing sunbeam illumines. Upon this mote, one fifth of
+the inhabitants have assumed supreme knowledge and understanding, given
+them, doubtless, because of their innate superiority. This preferment,
+also, is theirs by the grace of an infinitely just and merciful God.
+
+The other four fifths are supposedly in total darkness, though the same
+heavens are over their heads, the same earth under their feet, and
+though the light of sun and moon and the gentle radiance of the stars
+are freely given to all.
+
+There are the same opportunities for development and civilisation, but
+they have not received The Enlightenment. To them must go the foreign
+missionaries, to teach the things which have been graciously given them
+on account of their innate superiority.
+
+[Sidenote: Narrowing Circles]
+
+Man's life is a succession of narrowing circles. He admits the force of
+the heliocentric idea, for it is the sun which gives light and heat.
+Then the circle narrows, almost imperceptibly, for, of all the planets
+which circle around the sun, is not Earth the chief?
+
+This point being gained, he is inside the geocentric circle. Earth is
+the centre of creation. Sun, moon, and stars are auxiliary forces,
+bountifully arranged by the Giver of all Good for Earth's beauty and
+comfort. Of all the creatures who share in this, is not man the most
+important? Thus he retreats to the anthropocentric circle.
+
+[Sidenote: By Strength of Mind and Arm]
+
+Man is the centre of organic life, and it is easily seen that his race
+is far superior to the others. Their skins are not the same colour,
+their ships are not so mighty, their cunning with weapons is infinitely
+less. His race is dominant by strength of mind and arm.
+
+The dark-skinned races must be taught civilisation, with fire and sword,
+with cannon and bayonet, with crime and death. They must be civilised
+before they can be happy. The naked savage who sits beneath a palm tree,
+with his hut in the distance, while his wife and children hover around
+him, is happy only because he is too ignorant to know what happiness is.
+
+In order to be rightly happy, he must have a fine house, carriages, and
+servants, and live in a crowded city where tall buildings and smoke
+limit one's horizon to a narrow patch of blue. He must struggle daily
+with his fellows, not for the necessaries of life, but for small pieces
+of silver and bits of green paper, which are not nearly as pretty as
+glass beads.
+
+The savage, unaccustomed to refinement, stabs or beheads his enemy.
+Civilisation will teach him the uses of poison, and that putting typhoid
+germs into the drinking water of an Emperor is much more delicate and
+fully as effectual.
+
+[Sidenote: The Sublime Egotism]
+
+From this small circle, it is only a step to the centre and to that
+sublime egotism which has been named Vanity.
+
+Man repeats in his own life the development of a nation. He progresses
+from unquestioning happiness to childish inquiry and wonder, from fairy
+tales of princes and dragons to actual knowledge; through inquiry to
+doubt, through faith to disbelief, through civilisation to decay.
+
+He is not content to let other nations and others races pursue their
+normal development. He insists that the work of centuries be crowded
+into a generation. And in the same manner, the growth and strivings of
+his fellows call forth his unselfish aid. Having infinite treasures of
+mental equipment, gained by superior opportunity and wider experience,
+he will generously share his noble possessions.
+
+[Sidenote: Personal Vanity]
+
+It is personal vanity of the most flagrant type which intrudes itself,
+unasked, into other people's affairs. There are few of us who do not
+feel capable of ordering the daily lives of others, down to the most
+minute detail.
+
+We know how their houses should be arranged, how they should spend and
+invest their money, how they should dress, how they should comport
+themselves, and more definitely yet do we know the things they should
+not do. We know what is right and what is wrong, while they, poor
+things! do not. We know whom and when they should marry, how their
+children should be educated and trained, and what servants they should
+employ.
+
+We know for what pursuit each one is best fitted and how each should
+occupy his spare time. We know to what church all should go; what creed
+all should believe. We know what particular traits are faults and how
+these can be corrected. We know so much about other people that we often
+have not time to give due attention to ourselves. We neglect our own
+affairs that we may unselfishly direct others, and sometimes suffer in
+consequence, for nobody but a lawyer makes a good living by attending to
+other people's business.
+
+[Sidenote: Theoretically]
+
+Theoretically, this should be pleasing to each one. Every person of
+sense should be delighted at being told just what to do. It would
+relieve him from all care, all responsibility; the necessity for
+thought, planning, and individual judgment would be wholly removed.
+
+The musical student would not have to select his own instrument, his own
+teacher, nor even his own practice time. Every author would know just
+how and when to write, and in order to become famous, he need only act
+upon the suggestions for stories and improvement of style which are
+gratuitously given him from day to day, by people who cannot write a
+clear and correct sentence. This thing actually happened; consequently
+it is just the theme for fiction. This plot, suitably developed, would
+make the nations sit up, and send the race by hundred thousands to the
+corner bookstore.
+
+The cares incident to selecting a wardrobe would be wholly removed.
+Every woman knows how every other should dress. Her sure taste selects
+at a glance the thing which will best become the other, and over which
+the Unenlightened may ponder for hours.
+
+[Sidenote: A Common Vanity]
+
+There is no more common vanity than claiming to "know" some particular
+person. We are "all things to all men." The two who love each other
+better than all the world beside, have much knowledge, but it is not by
+any means complete. "Souls reach out to each other across the impassable
+gulfs of individual being." And yet, daily, people who have no sympathy
+with us, and scarcely a common interest, will assume to "know" us, when
+we do not fully know ourselves, and when we earnestly hide our real
+selves from all save the single soul we love.
+
+To assume intimate knowledge of the hundred considerations which make up
+a single situation, the various complexities of temperament and
+disposition which the personal equation continually produces in human
+affairs, of the imperceptible fibres of the web which lies between two
+souls, preventing always the fullest understanding, unless Love, the
+magician, gives new sight--amounts to the proclamation of practical
+Omnipotence.
+
+[Sidenote: "I Told You So"]
+
+There is no position in life which is secure. No complication ever comes
+to our friends, which our advice, acted upon, would not immediately
+solve. If our most minute directions are not thankfully received and put
+into effect, there is always the comforting indication of
+superiority--"I told you so."
+
+And when the jaded soul revolts in supreme defiance, declaring its right
+to its own life, its own duties, its own friendships, and its own loves,
+there is much expressed disgust, much misfortune predicted, and, saddest
+of all, much wounded vanity.
+
+The dominant egotism forbids that anything shall be better than itself.
+No success is comparable to one's own, no life so wisely ordered, and
+there is nothing so sad as the fame attained by those who do not follow
+our advice.
+
+Adversity is commonly accepted as the test of friendship, but there is
+another more certain still--success. Anyone may bestow pity. It is
+fatally easy to offer to those less fortunate than ourselves; whose
+capabilities have not proved adequate, as ours have; but it requires
+fine gifts of generous feeling to be genuinely glad at another's good
+fortune, in which we cannot by any possibility hope to share.
+
+[Sidenote: Advice]
+
+Advice is usually to be had for the asking. In the case of a corporation
+attorney or a specialist, there is a high value placed upon it, but it
+is to be freely had from those who love us, and, strangely enough, from
+those who do not.
+
+It is one of the blessings of love, that all the experience of another,
+all the battles of the other soul, are laid open for our better
+understanding of our own path. But there is a subtle distinction between
+the counsel of love and that of vanity. The one is unselfishly glad of
+our achievements, taking new delight in every step upward, while the
+other passes over triumphs in silence and carps upon the misfortune
+until it is not to be borne.
+
+From the intimate union of two loving souls, Vanity is forever shut out.
+Jealousy dare not show her malignant face. These two are facing the
+world together, side by side and shoulder to shoulder, each the other's
+strength and shield.
+
+Success may come only after many failures; the tide may not turn till
+after long discouragement and great despair. But in the union with that
+other soul, so gently baring its inmost dream that the other may
+understand, defeat loses its sting.
+
+[Sidenote: The Sanctuary of that Other Soul]
+
+Ambition forever beckons, like a will o' the wisp. When realisation
+seems within easy reach, the dream fades, or another, seemingly
+unattainable, mockingly takes its place. But in the sanctuary of that
+other soul, there is always new courage to be found. Long aisles and
+quiet spaces lessen the fever and the unrest. Darkness and cool shadows
+soothe the burning eyes, and in the clasp of those loving arms there is
+certain sleep.
+
+Vanity cares for nothing which is not in some way its own, and it is
+perhaps an amorphous vanity, as carbon is akin to a diamond, that makes
+a hard-won victory doubly dear.
+
+There are always sycophants to fawn and flatter, there are hands that
+will gladly help that they may claim their share of the result, but that
+realised dream is wholly sweet in which only the dreamer and the other
+soul have fully believed. Failure, even, is more easily borne if it is
+entirely one's own; if there is no one else to be blamed.
+
+[Sidenote: The Bitter Proof]
+
+"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." So spake the prophet in Jerusalem
+and the centuries have brought the bitter proof. Vanity has reared
+palaces which have vanished like the architecture of a mirage. Vanity
+has led the hosts against itself.
+
+Where are Babylon and Nineveh; the hanging gardens and the splendour of
+forgotten kings? Where are Cæsar and Cleopatra; Trianon and Marie
+Antoinette? Where is the lordly Empire of France? Is it buried with
+military honours, in the grave of the exiled Napoleon?
+
+Vanity's pomp endureth for a day, but Vanity itself is perennial. Vanity
+sets whole races of men in motion, pitting them against each other
+across intervening seas.
+
+One woman has a stone, no larger than a pea, brought from a mine in
+South Africa. Vanity sets it proudly upon her breast and leads other
+women to envy her its possession, for purely selfish reasons. One
+woman's gown is made from a plant which grows in Georgia and she is
+unhappy because it is not the product of a French or Japanese worm.
+
+One woman's coat is woven from the covering of a sheep, and she is not
+content because it has not cost a greater number of silver pieces and
+more bits of green paper, besides the life of an Arctic seal, that never
+harmed her nor hers.
+
+Vanity allows a tender-hearted woman, who cannot see a child or a dumb
+brute in pain, to order the tails of her horses cut to the fashionable
+length and to wear upon her hat the pitiful little body of a song-bird
+that has been skinned alive.
+
+Vanity permits a woman to trim the outer garments of the little stranger
+for whose coming she has long waited and prayed, with pretty, fluffy fur
+torn from the unborn baby of another mother--who is only a sheep. Vanity
+permits a woman to insist that her combs and pins shall be real
+tortoise-shell, which is obtained from the quivering animal by roasting
+it alive before a slow fire.
+
+[Sidenote: All is Vanity]
+
+"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!" The mad race still goes on. It is
+insatiate vanity which wrecks lives, ruins homes, torments one's
+fellows, and blinds the clear vision of its victims. It harms others,
+but most of all one's self.
+
+[Sidenote: The Conqueror]
+
+There is only one place from which it is shut out--from the union with
+that other soul. Great as it is, there is still a greater force; there
+is the inevitable conqueror, for Vanity cannot exist side by side with
+Love.
+
+
+
+
+Widowers and Widows
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Widowers and Widows
+
+
+Next to burglars, mice, and green worms, every normal girl fears a
+widow. Courtships have been upset and expected proposals have vanished
+into thin air, simply because a widow has come into the game. There is
+only one thing to do in such a case; retreat gracefully, and leave the
+field to her.
+
+[Sidenote: The Charm]
+
+A widow's degree of blandishment is conservatively estimated at
+twenty-five spinster power. At almost every session of spinsters, the
+question comes up for discussion. It is difficult to see just where the
+charm lies.
+
+A widow has, of course, a superior knowledge of ways and means. She has
+fully learned the value of silence, of food, and of judicious flattery.
+But these accomplishments may be acquired by the observing spinster who
+gives due attention to the subject.
+
+The mystery lies deeper than is first suspected. It is possible that the
+knowledge of her own limitations has something to do with it. A girl
+who has been flattered, adored, placed upon a pedestal and worshipped,
+naturally comes to the conclusion that she belongs there. She issues her
+commands from that height and conveys to man various delicate reminders
+of his servility.
+
+[Sidenote: The Pedestal Idea]
+
+When the same girl is married and by due operation of natural law
+becomes a widow, she doubtless has come to a better understanding of the
+pedestal idea. Hence she does not attempt the impossible, and satisfies
+herself with working those miracles which are comparatively simple.
+
+A widow has all of the freedom of a girl, combined with the liberty of a
+married woman. She has the secure social position of a matron without
+the drawback of a husband. She is nearer absolute independence than
+other women are ever known to be.
+
+Where a girl is strong and self-reliant, a widow is helpless and
+confiding. She can never carry her own parcels, put on her own
+overshoes, or button her own gloves. A widow's shoe laces have never
+been known to stay tied for any length of time, unless she has shapeless
+ankles and expansive feet.
+
+A widow's telegrams must always be taken to the office by some man.
+Time-tables are beyond her understanding and she never knows about
+trains. It frequently takes three or four men to launch a widow upon a
+two-hundred-mile journey, while a girl can start across the continent
+with considerably less commotion.
+
+[Sidenote: The Inference]
+
+The inference is, of course, that she has been accustomed to these
+delicate attentions--that the dear departed has always done such things.
+The pretty way in which she asks favours carries out the delusion. He
+would be a brute, indeed, who could refuse the little service for which
+she pleads.
+
+The dear departed, naturally, was delighted to do these things, or he
+would not have done them--such being the way of the married man.
+Consequently, the lady was very tenderly loved--and men follow each
+other like sheep in matters of the heart.
+
+The attraction a widower has for a girl is in inverse proportion to a
+widow's influence over a man. It is true that the second wife is usually
+better treated than the first, and that the new occupant of a man's
+heart reaps the benefit of her predecessor's training. But it is not
+until spinsterhood is fully confirmed by grey hair and the family Bible
+that a girl begins to look with favour upon the army of the detached.
+
+[Sidenote: The Food of her Soul]
+
+It seems to her that all the romance is necessarily gone--and it is
+romance upon which her soul feeds. There can be none of that dear
+delight in the first home building, which is the most beautiful part of
+marriage to a girl. Her pretty concern about draperies and colours is
+all an old story to the man. She may even have to buy her kitchen ware
+all alone, and it is considered the nicest thing in the world to have a
+man along when pots and pans are bought.
+
+If widowers and widows would only mate with each other, instead of
+trespassing upon the hunting grounds of the unmarried! It is an
+exceptional case in which the bereaved are not mutually wary. They seem
+to prefer the unfair advantage gained by having all the experience on
+one side.
+
+The normal man proposes with ease and carelessness, but the ceremony is
+second nature to a widower. If he meets a girl he likes, he proceeds at
+once to business and is slow indeed for his kind if he does not offer
+his hand and heart within a week.
+
+A clever man once wrote a story, describing the coming of a girl to a
+widower's house. With care and forethought, the dying wife had left a
+letter for her successor, which the man fearlessly gave her before she
+had taken off her hat, because, as the story-teller naïevely adds, "she
+was twenty-eight and very sane."
+
+[Sidenote: A Nice Letter]
+
+This letter proved to be various admonitions to the bride and earnest
+hopes that she might make her husband happy. It was all very pretty and
+it was surely a nice letter, but no woman could fail to see that it was
+an exquisite revenge upon the man who had been rash enough to install
+another in the place of the dead.
+
+There was not a line which was not kind, nor a word which did not
+contain a hidden sting. It would be enough to make one shudder all one's
+life--this hand of welcome extended from the grave. Yet everything
+continued happily--perhaps because a man wrote the story.
+
+A woman demands not only all of a man's life, but all of his thoughts
+after she is dead. The grave may hide much, but not that particular
+quality in woman's nature. If it is common to leave letters for
+succeeding wives, it is done with sinister purpose.
+
+Romance is usually considered an attribute of youth, and possibly the
+years bring views of marriage which are impossible to the younger
+generation. No girl, in her wildest moments, ever dreams of marrying a
+widower with three or four children, yet, when she is well on in her
+thirties, with her heart still unsatisfied, she often does that very
+thing, and happily at that.
+
+[Sidenote: The Hidden Heartache]
+
+Still, there must be a hidden heartache, for woman, with her love of
+love, is unable to understand the series of distinct and unrelated
+episodes which make up the love of a man. It is hard to take the crumbs
+another woman has left, especially if a goodly portion of a man's heart
+is suspected to lie in the grave.
+
+It is harder still, if helpless children are daily to look into her
+face, with eyes which are neither hers nor his, and the supreme
+crucifixion in the life of a woman whose ideals have not changed, is to
+go into a home which has been made by the hands of a dead and dearly
+loved wife.
+
+To a woman, material things are always heavily laden with memories.
+There is not a single article of furniture which has not its own
+individuality. She cannot consider a piece of embroidery apart from the
+dead hands that made it, nor a chair without some association with its
+previous occupants.
+
+Sometimes the rooms are heavily laden with portraits which are to
+confront her from day to day with the taunting presence. She is obliged
+to tell callers that the crayon upon the opposite wall is "the first
+Mrs. ----." There are also pictures of the first wife's dead children,
+and here and there the inevitable photograph, of years gone by, of bride
+and groom in wedding garments--the man sitting down, of course, while
+his wife stands behind him, as a servant might, with her hand upon his
+chair.
+
+[Sidenote: Day by Day]
+
+Day by day, those eyes are fixed upon her in stern judgment. Her
+failings and her conscious virtues are forever before that other woman.
+Her tears and her laughter are alike subjected to that remorseless
+scrutiny.
+
+[Sidenote: A Sheeted Spectre]
+
+Does she dare to forget and be happy? The other woman looks down upon
+her like a sheeted spectre conveying a solemn warning. "You may die,"
+those pictured lips seem to say, "and some other will take your place,
+as you have taken mine." When the tactlessness, bad temper, or general
+mulishness of man wrings unwilling tears from her eyes, there is no
+sympathy to be gained from that impalpable presence. "You should not
+have married him," the picture seems to say, or; "He treated me the same
+way, and I died."
+
+She is not to be blamed if she fancies that her husband also feels the
+presence of the other. As she pours his coffee in the morning and he
+looks upon her with the fond glance which men bestow upon women about to
+give them food, she may easily imagine that he sees the other in her
+place. Even the clasp of her hand or the touch of her lips may bring a
+longing for that other, hidden in the far-off grave.
+
+Broadly speaking, widowers make better husbands than widows do wives.
+The presence of the dead wife may be a taunting memory, but seldom
+more. It is not often that she is spoken of, unless it is to praise her
+cooking. If she made incomparable biscuits and her coffee was fit to be
+the nectar of the gods, there are apt to be frequent and tactless
+comparisons, until painful experience teaches the sinner that this will
+not do.
+
+[Sidenote: "A Shining Mark"]
+
+On the contrary, a widow's second husband is often the most sincere
+mourner of her first. As time goes on, he realises keenly what a doleful
+day it was for him when that other died. "Death loves a shining mark,"
+and that first husband was always such a paragon of perfection that it
+seems like an inadvertence because he was permitted to glorify this
+sodden sphere at all. She keeps, in heart at least, and often by outward
+observance, the anniversaries of her former engagement and marriage. The
+love letters of the dead are put away with her jewels and bits of real
+lace.
+
+Small defections are commented upon and odious parallels drawn. Her home
+is seen to be miserably inadequate beside the one she once had. Her
+supply of pin money is painfully small, judged by the standard which has
+hitherto been her guide. Callers are entertained with anecdotes of "my
+first husband," and her dinner table is graced with the same stories
+that famous raconteur was wont to tell.
+
+If her present husband pays her a compliment, he is reminded that his
+predecessor was accustomed to say the same thing. The relatives of the
+first wife are gently made aware that their acquaintance is not desired.
+His manner of life is carefully renovated and his old friendships put
+away with moth balls and camphor, never to see the light again.
+
+[Sidenote: The Best Advertisement]
+
+Yet the best possible advertisement of matrimony is the rapidity with
+which the bereaved seek new mates. There is no more delicate compliment
+to a first marriage than a second alliance, even when divorce, rather
+than death, has been the separating agency. A divorced man has more
+power to charm than a widower, because there is always the supposition
+that he was not understood and that his life's happiness is still to
+come.
+
+[Sidenote: Forgetting]
+
+Forgetting is the finest art of life and is to be desired more than
+memory, even though Mnemosyne stands close by Lethe and with her dewy
+finger-tips soothes away all pain. The lowest life remembers; to the
+highest only is it given to forget.
+
+Yet, when the last word is said, this is the dread and the pity of
+death. It is not "the breathless darkness and the narrow house," but the
+certain knowledge that one's place can almost instantly be filled. The
+lips that quiver with sobs will some day smile again, eyes dimmed by
+long weeping will dance with laughter, hearts that once ached bitterly
+will some day swell and overflow with a new love.
+
+This knowledge lies heavily upon a woman's soul and saddens, though
+often imperceptibly, the happiest marriage. All her toil and striving
+may some day be for naught. The fruits of her industry and thrift may
+some day gleam in jewels upon the white throat of another woman. Silks
+and laces which she could not have will add to the beauty of the
+possible woman who will ascend her vacant throne.
+
+Sometimes a woman remains faithful to a memory, and sometimes, though
+rarely, a man may do the same. There is only one relation in life which
+may not be formed again--that between a mother and her child.
+
+[Sidenote: The Child Upon Her Breast]
+
+The little one may have lived but a few days, yet, if it has once lain
+upon her breast, she has something Death may never hope to destroy.
+Other children, equally dear, may grow to stalwart manhood and gracious
+womanhood, but that face rises to immortality in a world of endless
+change.
+
+No single cry, no weak clasp of baby fingers is ever forgotten. Through
+all the years, unchanging, and taking on new beauty with every fleeting
+day, the little face is still before her. And thus in a way Death brings
+her a blessing, for when the others have grown she has it still--the
+child upon her breast.
+
+Love's best gifts are not to be taken away. Tender memories must always
+be inwoven with the sad, and the sympathy and unselfishness which great
+loves ever bring are left to make sweet the nature of one who is
+chastened by sorrow. Grief itself never stings; it is the accusing
+conscience which turns the dagger remorselessly in the heart.
+
+[Sidenote: Our unsuspected Kindness]
+
+Life, after all, is a masquerade. We fear to show our tenderness and our
+love. We habitually hide our best feelings, lest we be judged weak and
+emotional, and unfit for the age in which it is our privilege to move.
+Sometimes it needs Death to show us ourselves and to teach our friends
+our deep and unsuspected kindness.
+
+The woman who hungers throughout her marriage for the daily expression
+of her husband's love, often looks longingly towards the day to come,
+when hot tears will fall upon her upturned face and that for which she
+has vainly thirsted will be laid upon her silent lips. But swiftly upon
+the vision comes the thought, that even so, it would be of short
+duration; that the newly awakened love would soon be the portion of
+someone else.
+
+It would be a beautiful world, indeed, if we were not at such pains to
+hide our real selves--if all our kindly thoughts were spoken and all our
+generous deeds were done. No one of us would think of Death as our best
+friend, if we were not all so bitterly unkind. Yet we put into white
+fingers the roses for which the living might have pleaded in vain, and
+too often, with streaming eyes, we ask pardon of the dead.
+
+[Sidenote: Atonement]
+
+Atonement is not to be made thus. A costly monument in a public square
+is tardy appreciation of a genius whose generation refused him bread. A
+man's tears upon a woman's hands are not enough, when all her life she
+has prayed for his love.
+
+There is no law so unrelenting as that of compensation. Gravitation
+itself may be more successfully defied. It is the one thing which is
+absolutely just and which is universal in its action, though sometimes
+as slow as the majestic forces which change rock to dust.
+
+We cannot have more joy than we give--nor more pain. The eternal balance
+swings true. The capacity for enjoyment and the capacity for suffering
+are one and the same. He who lives out of reach of sorrow has sacrificed
+his possible ecstasy. "He has seen only half the universe who has not
+been shown the House of Pain."
+
+[Sidenote: Emerson's "Compensation"]
+
+"And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the
+understanding also after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation,
+a cruel disappointment, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid
+loss and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force
+that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother,
+lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the
+aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our
+way of life, terminating an epoch of infancy or youth which was waiting
+to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation or a household or style of
+living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth
+of character. It permits or constrains the formation of new
+acquaintances, and the reception of new influences that prove of the
+first importance to the next years; and the man or woman who would have
+remained a sunny garden flower, with no room for its roots and too much
+sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of
+the gardener is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit
+to wide neighbourhoods of men."
+
+[Sidenote: Upon the Upland Ways]
+
+That life alone is worth the living which sets itself upon the upland
+ways. To steel one's self against joy to be spared the inevitable hurt,
+is not life. We are afraid of love, because the might and terror of it
+has sometimes brought despair. We are afraid of belief, because our
+trust has been betrayed. We are afraid of death, because we have seen
+forgetfulness.
+
+We should not fear that someone might take our place in the heart that
+loves us best--if we were only loved enough. The same love is never
+given twice; it differs in quality if not in degree, and when once made
+one's own, is never to be lost.
+
+There are some natures whose happiness is a matter of persons and
+things; some to love and some to be loved; the daily needs amply
+satisfied, and that is enough for content.
+
+There are others with whom persons and things do not suffice, whose love
+is vital, elemental, and indestructible. It has no beginning and no end;
+it simply is. With this the Grey Angel has no power; the grave is robbed
+of its victory and death of its sting.
+
+"Love never denied Death and Death will not deny Love." When the bond is
+of that finer sort which does not rely upon presence for its permanence,
+there is little bereavement to be felt. For mutely, like a guardian
+angel, that other may live with us still; not as a shadowy presence,
+but rather as a dear reality.
+
+That little mound of earth upon the distant hill, over which the sun and
+stars pass in endless sequence, and where the quiet is unbroken through
+the change of spring to autumn, and the change of autumn to spring, has
+not the power to destroy love, but rather to make it more sure.
+
+The one who sleeps is forever beyond the reach of doubt and
+misunderstanding. Separation, estrangement, and bitterness, which are
+sometimes concealed in the cup that Life and Love have given, are
+forever taken out by Death, who is never cruel and who is often kind.
+
+[Sidenote: The Wanderer's Rest]
+
+We tread upon earth and revile it, forgetting that at last it hides our
+defects and that through it our dead hearts climb to blossom in violets
+and rue. Death is the Wanderer's Rest, where there is no questioning,
+but the same healing sleep for all. In that divine peace, there is no
+room for regret, since the earthly loves are sure of immortality.
+
+[Sidenote: While the Dream Seemed True]
+
+As much as is vital will live on, unchanging, changeless, and taking on
+new sweetness with the years. That which is not wholly given, which is
+ours only for a little time, will fade as surely as the roses in the
+marble hands. Death has saved many a heartache, by coming while the
+dream still seemed true.
+
+In a single passage, Emerson has voiced the undying beauty and the
+everlasting truth which lie beneath the perplexities of life.
+
+"Oh, believe as thou livest, that every sound which is spoken over the
+round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear.
+Every proverb, every book, every byword which belongs to thee for aid or
+comfort, shall surely come home, through open or winding passages. Every
+friend, whom not thy fantastic will, but the great and tender heart in
+thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this, because the
+heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an
+intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls
+uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of
+the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one."
+
+[Sidenote: The Everlasting Love]
+
+Sometimes, into two hearts great enough to hold it, and into two souls
+where it may forever abide, there comes the Everlasting Love. It is
+elemental, like fire and the sea, with the depth and splendour of the
+surge and the glory of the flame. It makes the world a vast cathedral,
+in which they two may worship, and where, even in the darkness, there is
+the peace which passeth all understanding, because it is of God.
+
+When the time of parting comes, for there is always that turning in the
+road, the sadness is not so great because one must go on alone. Life
+grows beautiful after a time and even wholly sweet, when a man and a
+woman have so lived and loved and worked together, that death is not
+good-bye, but rather--"auf wiedersehen."
+
+
+
+
+The Consolations of Spinsterhood
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+The Consolations of Spinsterhood
+
+
+[Sidenote: "A Great Miration"]
+
+The attached members of the community are wont to make what Uncle Remus
+called "a great miration," when a woman deliberately chooses
+spinsterhood as her lot in life, rather than marriage.
+
+There is an implied pity in their delicate inquiries, and always the
+insinuation that the spinster in question could never have had an offer
+of marriage. The husband of the lady leading the inquisition may have
+been one of the spinster's first admirers, but it is never safe to say
+so, for so simple a thing as this has been known to cause trouble in
+families.
+
+If it is known positively that some man has offered her his name and his
+troubles, and there is still no solitaire to be seen, the logical
+hypothesis is charitably advanced, that she has been "disappointed in
+love." It is possible for a spinster to be disappointed in lovers, but
+only the married are ever disappointed in love.
+
+[Sidenote: A Cause of Stagnation]
+
+The married women who ask the questions and who, with gracious kindness,
+hunt up attractive men for the unfortunate young woman to meet, are, all
+unknowingly, one great cause of stagnation in the marriage-license
+market.
+
+Nothing so pleases a woman safely inside the bonds of holy matrimony as
+to confide her sorrows, her regrets, and her broken ideals to her
+unattached friends. Many a woman thinks her ideal is broken when it is
+only sprained, but the effect is the same.
+
+Was the coffee weak and were the waffles cold, and did Monsieur express
+his opinion of such a breakfast in language more concise than elegant?
+Madame weeps, and gives a lurid account of the event to the visiting
+spinster. By any chance, does a girl go from her own dainty and orderly
+room into an apartment strewn with masculine belongings, confounded upon
+confusion such as Milton never dreamed? Does she have to wait while her
+friend restores order to the chaos? If so, she puts it down in her
+mental note-book, upon the page headed "Against."
+
+The small domestic irritations which crowd upon the attached woman from
+day to day, leaving crow's feet around her eyes and delicate tracery in
+her forehead, have a certain effect upon the observing. But worse than
+this is the spectre of "the other woman," which haunts her friend from
+day to day, to the grave--and after, if the dead could tell their
+thoughts.
+
+If she has been safely shielded from books which were not written for
+The Young Person, Mademoiselle believes that marriage is a bond which is
+not to be broken except by death. It is a severe shock when she first
+discovers that death changes nothing; that it is only life which
+separates utterly.
+
+[Sidenote: That Pitiful Story]
+
+That pitiful story of "the other woman" comes from quarters which the
+uninitiated would never suspect. With grim loyalty, married women hide
+their hearts from each other. Many a smile conceals a tortured soul.
+When the burden is no longer to be borne, a spinster is asked to share
+it.
+
+A woman will forgive a man anything except disloyalty to herself. Crimes
+which the law stands ready to punish rank as naught with her, if the
+love between them is untarnished by doubt or mistrust. Any offence
+prompted by her own charm, even a duel to the death with a rival suitor,
+is easily condoned. But though God may be able to forgive disloyalty, in
+her heart of hearts no woman ever can.
+
+[Sidenote: An Idle Flirtation]
+
+More often than not, it is simply an idle flirtation, or, at the most, a
+passing fancy which the next week may prove transient and unreal. The
+woman with the heartache will say, with wet eyes and quivering lips: "I
+know, positively, that my husband has done nothing wrong. I would go to
+the stake upon that belief. He is only weak and foolish and a little
+vain, perhaps, and some day he will see his mistake, but I cannot bear
+to see him compromise himself and me in the eyes of the world. Of
+course, _I_ know," she will say, proudly, "but there are others who do
+not,--who are always ready to suspect,--and I will not have them pity
+me!"
+
+When nearly all the married friends a spinster has have come to her with
+the same story, the variations being individual and of slight moment,
+she begins to have serious doubts of matrimony as a satisfactory
+career. Women who have been married five, ten, and even twenty years;
+women with children grown and whom the world counts safely and happily
+married, will sob bitterly in the embrace of the chosen girl friend.
+
+[Sidenote: Indifference]
+
+Indifference is the only counsel one has to offer, but even so, it
+gradually becomes the first of the steppes upon the heart-way which lead
+to an emotional Siberia.
+
+Of course there are women who are insanely jealous of their husbands,
+and, more rarely, men who are jealous of their wives. Jealousy may be
+explained as innate vanity and selfishness or as a defect in
+temperament, but at any rate, it is a condition which is far past the
+theoretical stage.
+
+It is hard for a spinster to understand why any woman should wish to
+hold a man against his will. A dog who has to be kept chained, in order
+to be retained as a pet, is never a very satisfactory possession. It
+seems natural to apply the same reasoning to human affairs, for surely
+no love is worth having which is not a free gift.
+
+No girl would feel particularly flattered by a proposal, if it were put
+in this form: "Will you marry me? No one else will." Yet the same girl,
+married, would gladly take her husband to a desert island, that she
+might be sure of him forever.
+
+[Sidenote: Behind Prison Bars]
+
+Love which needs to be put behind prison bars, that it may not escape,
+is not love, but attraction, fascination, or whatever the psychologists
+may please. A man chooses his wife, not because there are no other
+women, but in spite of them. It is a pathetic acknowledgment of his poor
+judgment, if he lets the world suspect that his choice was wrong.
+
+There are some souls that hie them faraway from civilisation, to
+convents, monasteries, and western plains, that they may keep away from
+temptation. In the same fashion, woman tries to isolate her lord and
+master. If he meets women at all, they are those invisibly labeled "not
+dangerous."
+
+The world makes as many saints as sinners, and the man who needs to be
+kept away from any sort of temptation is weak indeed. There are many of
+his kind, but he is the better man in the end who meets it face to face,
+fights with it like a soldier, and wins like a king.
+
+[Sidenote: The Thousand Foes]
+
+The mother of Sparta bade her son return with his shield or on it, and
+the thought has potential might to-day. If a man honestly loves a woman,
+she need have no fear of the thousand foes that wait to take him from
+her. If he does not, the sooner she understands the truth, the better it
+is for both. There are many people who consider love a dream, but they
+usually grow to think of marriage as the cold breakfast.
+
+Men are but children of a larger growth. A small boy forgets his promise
+to stay at home and tears madly down the street in the discordant wake
+of a band. The same boy, in later years, will follow his impulses with
+equal readiness, for he is taught conformity to outward laws, but very
+seldom self-control.
+
+The fear of "the other woman" may be largely assuaged by a spinster's
+confidence in her ability to cope with the difficult situation, should
+it ever present itself, but there are other considerations which act as
+a discouragement to matrimony.
+
+The chains of love may be sweet bondage, but freedom is hardly less
+dear. The spinster, like the wind, may go where she listeth, and there
+is no one to say her nay. A modern essayist has pointed out that "if a
+mortal knows his mate cannot get away, he is apt to be severe and
+unreasonable."
+
+The thought of being compelled to ask for money, and perhaps to meet
+with refusal, frequently acts as a deterrent upon incipient love. A man
+is often generous with his sweetheart and miserly with his wife. In the
+days of courtship, the dollars may fly on wings in search of pleasure
+for the well-beloved, and yet, after marriage, they will be squeezed
+until the milling is worn smooth, the eyes start from the eagle, and
+until one half-way expects to hear the noble bird scream.
+
+[Sidenote: Unlimited Credit]
+
+There are girls in every circle, married to men not by any means
+insolvent, who have unlimited credit, but never any money of their own.
+They have carriages but no car fare; fine stationery, monogrammed and
+blazoned with a coat of arms, but not by any chance a postage stamp.
+
+Many a woman in such circumstances covenants with the tradespeople to
+charge as merchandise what is really cash, and sells laces and ribbons
+to her friends a little below cost. When a girl is approached with a
+plea to have her purchases charged to her friend's account, and to pay
+her friend rather than the merchant, is it not sufficient to postpone
+possible matrimony at least six months? Adversity has no terrors for a
+woman; she will gladly share misfortune with the man she loves, but
+simple selfishness is a very different proposition.
+
+[Sidenote: "Wedded to their Art"]
+
+There are also the dazzling allurements offered by various "careers"
+which bring fame and perhaps fortune. The glittering triumphs of a prima
+donna, a picture on the line in the Salon, or a possible book which
+shall sell into the hundred thousands, are not without a certain charm,
+even though people who are "wedded to their art" sometimes get a divorce
+without asking for it.
+
+The universal testimony of the great, that fame itself is barren, is
+thrust aside as of small moment. She does not realise that it is love
+for which she hungers, rather than fame, which is the admiration of the
+many. Sometimes she learns that "the love of all is but a small thing to
+the love of one" and that in a right marriage there would be no
+conscious sacrifice. If she were not free to continue the work that she
+loved, she would feel no deprivation.
+
+Happiness is often thrust aside because of her ideals. She demands all
+things in a single man, forgetting that she, too, is human and not by
+any means faultless. Some day, perhaps too late, she understands that
+love and criticism lie far apart, that love brings beauty with it, and
+that the marks of individuality are the very texture of charm, as the
+splendour of the opal lies in its flaws.
+
+[Sidenote: The Vital Touch]
+
+There is always the doubt as to whether the seeker may be the one of all
+the world to find the inmost places in her heart. Taste and temperament
+may be akin, position and purpose in full accord, and yet the vital
+touch may be lacking. Sometimes, in the after-years, it may be found by
+two who seek for it patiently together, but too often dissonance grows
+into discord and estrangement.
+
+The march of civilisation has done away with the odium which was
+formerly the portion of the unattached woman. It is no disgrace to be a
+spinster, and apparently it is fitting and proper to be an old maid,
+since so many of them have "Mrs." on their cards, and since there are
+so many narrow-minded and critical men who fully deserve the
+appellation.
+
+There is no use in saying that any particular girl is a spinster from
+necessity rather than choice. One has but to look at the peculiar
+specimens of womankind who have married, to be certain that there is no
+one on the wide earth who could not do so if she chose.
+
+[Sidenote: "A Discipline"]
+
+Some people are fond of alluding to marriage as "a discipline," and
+sometimes a grey-haired matron will volunteer the information that "the
+first years of marriage are anything but happy." To one who has hitherto
+regarded it from a different point of view, the training-school idea is
+not altogether attractive.
+
+Men and women who have been through it very seldom hold to their first
+opinions. It is considered as a business arrangement, a social
+contrivance, sometimes as an easy way to make money, but by very few as
+the highest form of happiness.
+
+[Sidenote: Small Extravagances]
+
+The consolations of spinsterhood are mainly negative, but the minus sign
+has its proper place in the personal equation. "The other woman" does
+not exist for the spinster, save as a shadowy possibility. She is not
+asked what she did with the nickel which was given her day before
+yesterday, and thus forced to make confession of small extravagances, or
+to reply, with such sweetness as she may muster, that she bought a lot
+on a fashionable street with part of it, and has the remainder out at
+interest. She does not have to stay at home from social affairs because
+she has no escort, for the law has not apportioned to her a solitary
+man, and she has a liberty of choice which is not accorded her married
+friend.
+
+She is not subjected to the humiliation of asking a man for money to pay
+for his own food, his own service, and even his own laundry bill. She
+can usually earn her own, if the gods have not awarded her sufficient
+gold, and there is no money which a woman spends so happily as that
+which she has earned herself.
+
+The "career" lies before her, and she has only to choose the thing for
+which she is best fitted, and work her way upward from the lowest ranks
+to the position of a star of the first magnitude. Opportunity is but
+another name for health, obstacles make firm stepping-stones, and that
+which is dearly bought is by far the sweetest in the end. Of course
+there are "strings to pull," but no one needs them. Success is more
+lasting if it is won in an open field, without favour, and in spite of
+generous measures of it bestowed upon the opposition.
+
+[Sidenote: The Greatest Consolation]
+
+But of all the consolations of spinsterhood, the greatest is this,--that
+out of the dim and uncertain future, perchance in the guise of a
+divorced man or a widower with four children, The Prince may yet come.
+
+"On his plain but trusty sword are these words only--Love and
+Understand." Across the unsounded, estranging seas, with a whole world
+lying immutably between, he, too, may be waiting for the revelation. He
+may come as a knight of old, with banners, jewels, and flashing steel,
+to the clarion ring of trumpet or cymbal, or softly, in the twilight,
+like one whose presence is felt before it is made known.
+
+Out of the city streets The Prince may come, tired of the endless
+struggle, when the tide of the human has beaten heavily upon his jaded
+soul, or through the woods, with the silence of the forest still upon
+him. His path may lie through an old garden, where marigold and larkspur
+are thickly interwoven, and shadowy spikes of mignonette make all the
+summer sweet, or through the frosty darkness, when the earth is dumb
+with snow and the midnight stars have set the heavens ablaze with spires
+of sapphire light.
+
+[Sidenote: At the First Meeting]
+
+Sometimes, at the first meeting The Prince is known, by that mysterious
+alchemy which lies in the depths of the maiden soul and often, after
+long waiting, a friend throws off his disguise and royalty stands
+revealed. Sometimes he is the comrade of the far-off childish years, the
+schoolmate of a later time, or someone whose hand has proved a strength
+and solace in times of deepest grief.
+
+"To Love and Understand!" All else may be forgiven, if he has but these
+two gifts, for they are as the crest and royal robe. Bare and empty his
+hands may be, but these are the kingly rights.
+
+Slowly, and sometimes with a strange fear which makes her tremble, there
+steals into her heart a great peace. With it comes infinite tenderness
+and an unspeakable compassion, not only for him, but for all the world.
+Love's laughter changes to questioning too deep for smiles or tears--the
+boundless aspiration of the soul toward all things true.
+
+Playthings and tinsel are cast away. The music of the dance dies in
+lingering, discordant fragments, and in its place comes the full tone of
+an organ and the majestic movement of a symphony. The web of the daily
+living grows beautiful in the new light, for the Hand that set the
+pattern has been gently laid upon her loom.
+
+[Sidenote: Through all the Years to Come]
+
+Through all the years to come, they are to be together; he and she.
+There will be no terror in the wilderness, no sting in poverty or
+defeat--hunger and thirst can be forgotten. Wherever Destiny may point
+the way, they are to fare together--he and she.
+
+Somewhere, in a world whose only shame is its uncleanliness, they two
+are to make a home and keep the little space around them wholly clean.
+Somewhere, they two will show the world that the old ideals are not
+lost; that a man and a woman may still live together in supreme and
+lasting content. Somewhere, too, they will teach anew the old lesson,
+that it is unyielding Honour at the core of things that keeps them sound
+and sweet.
+
+There is nothing in all life so beautiful as that first dream of Home; a
+place where there is balm for the tortured soul, new courage for the
+wavering soul, rest for the tired soul, and stronger trust for the soul
+caught in the snares of doubt and disbelief--a place where one may be
+wholly and joyfully one's self, where one's mistakes are never faults,
+where pardon ever anticipates the asking, where love follows swiftly
+upon understanding and understanding upon love.
+
+[Sidenote: The Sceptre of the King]
+
+"To Love and Understand!" He who holds the sceptre of the king may rule
+right royally. There is solace for the tired traveller within the
+cloister of that other heart, and the pitiful chains which some call
+marriage would rust and decay at the entrance to that holy place.
+
+The spotless peace within the inner chamber is his alone. There his
+motives are never questioned, nor his words distorted beyond their
+meaning, and his daily purposes are ever read aright.
+
+The dream is forever centred upon the coming of The Prince. Sometimes,
+with the grim irony of Fate, he is seen when both are bound--and there
+are some who deem a heartache too great a price to pay for the
+revelation. Now and then, after many years, he comes to claim his own.
+
+[Sidenote: The Grey Angel and the Prince]
+
+And sometimes, too, when one has long waited and prayed for his coming;
+when the sight has grown dim with watching and the frosty rime of winter
+has softly touched the dark hair, the Grey Angel takes pity and closes
+the tired eyes.
+
+The lavender and the dead rose-leaves breathe a hushed fragrance from
+the heaps of long-stored linen; the cricket and the tiny clock keep up
+their cheery song, because they do not know their gentle mistress can no
+longer hear. The slanting sunbeams of afternoon mark out a delicate
+tracery upon the floor, and the shadow of the rose-geranium in the
+window is silhouetted upon the opposite wall. And then, into the quiet
+house, steals something which seems like an infinite calm.
+
+[Sidenote: The Exquisite Peace]
+
+But the dainty little lady who lies fast asleep, with the sun resting
+caressingly upon her, has gained, in that mystical moment, both
+understanding and love. For there comes an exquisite peace upon her--as
+though she had found The Prince.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Spinster Book, by Myrtle Reed
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