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]