"A Pearl, A Girl."
-Browning
There are of course, girls and girls; yet at heart they are pretty much
alike. In age, naturally, they differ wildly. But this is a thorny
subject. Suffice it to say that all men love all girls-the maid of
sweet sixteen equally with the maid of untold age.
* * *
There is something exasperatingly something-or-otherish about girls. And
they know it--which makes them more something-or-otherish still:--there
is no other word for it.
* * *
A girl is a complicated thing. It is made up of clothes, smiles, a
pompadour, things of which space and prudence forbid the enumeration
here. These things by themselves do not constitute a girl which is
obvious; nor is any one girl without these things which is not too
obvious. Where the things end and the girl begins many men have tried to
find out.
Many girls would like to be men--except on occasions. At least so they
say, but perhaps this is just a part of their something-or-otherishness.
Why they should want to be men, men cannot conceive. Men pale before
them, grow hot and cold before them, run before them (and after them),
swear by them (and at them), and a bit of a chit of a thing in short
skirts and lisle-thread stockings will twist able-bodied males round her
little finger.
It is an open secret that girls are fonder of men than they are of one
another--which is very lucky for the men.
Girls differ; and the same girl is different at different times. When
she is by herself, she is one thing. When she is with other girls she is
another thing. When she is with a lot of men, she is a third sort of
thing. When she is with a man. . . But this baffled even Agur the son
of Jakeh.
As a rule, a man prefers a girl by herself. This is natural. And yet is
said that you cannot have too much of a good thing. If this were true, a
bevy of girls would be the height of happiness. Yet some men would
sooner face the bulls of Bashan.
Some foolish men--probably poets--have sought for and asserted the
existence of the ideal girl. This is sheer nonsense: there is no such
thing. And if there were, she could not compare with the real girl, the
girl of flesh and blood--which (as some one ought to have said) are
excellent things in woman.
Other men, equally foolish, have regarded girls as playthings. I wish
these men had tried to play with them. They would have found that they
were playing with fire and brimstone. Yet the veriest spit-fire can be
wondrous sweet.
Sweet? Yes. On the whole a girl is the sweetest thing known or
knowable. On the 6 whole of this terrestrial sphere Nature has produced
nothing more adorable than the high-spirited high-bred girl.--Of this
she is quite aware--to our cost (I speak as a man). The consequence is,
her price has gone up, and man has to pay high and pay all sorts of
things--ices, sweets, champagne, drives, church-goings, and sometimes
spot-cash.
Men are always wishing they knew all about girls. It is a precious good
thing that they don't.--Not that this is in any way disparaging to the
girls. The fact is
A girl is an infinite puzzle, and it is this puzzle, that, among other
things, tickles the men, and rouses their curiosity.
What a man doesn't know about a girl would fill a Saratoga trunk; what
her does know about her would go into her work-box.
* * *
The littlest girl is a little women. No boy knows this--and precious
few grown up men. Thus
Many a grown up man plays with a girl, then finds himself in love with
her. As to the girl---
Always the girl knows whether the play is leading: she probably chooses
the game.
* * *
Very late in life does a man learn the truth (and significance) of that
ancient proverb that Kissing goes by Favour. For
The masculine mind is the slave of Law and Justice:
Aphrodite never heard of Law or Justice: she was born at sea. That is to
say,
Few are the men who at some time in their lives have not wondered at the
vagaries of girlish complaisance: the foolish, the ne'er-do-well, the
bully, the careless, the cruel,--it is to these often that a girls'
caress is given. And,
Curiously enough, that is, curiously enough as it seems to purblind
law-loving man,--should the favored one be openly convicted, that
alters not one whit his statue with the girl; for,
A girl, having given her heart, never recalls it not wholly: she may
regret; she never recoils. In other words,
To the man of her own free lawless choice a girl is always loyal; to
subsequent and subordinate attachments she is dutiful. So,
Even the renegade, if loved by a girl, will be upheld by that girl
through thick and thin--secretly, it may be, for often the girl,
nevertheless devotedly, and only under compulsion will he listen to the
detractor: he may desert her, or, if he sticks to her, he may beat her;
no matter: he holds her heart in the hollow of his hand. But, But,
Few things mystify poor law-abiding man than this, that the central, the
profoundest, the most portentous puzzle of the universe--the weal of woe
of two high-aspiring, much-enduring, youthful human souls, should be the
sport of what seems to him the veriest and merest chance.
* * *
The unconscious search of sweet sixteen is for (in mathematical language
which will not sophisticate her) the integral of love.--Yet
In the short years between sixteen and twenty a girl's love will undergo
rapid and startling developments.
* * *
A girl with lots of brothers has more chances of matrimony than a girl
with none: she knows more of men; especially of their weaknesses and
idiosyncrasies. And
To know the weaknesses and idiosyncrasies of men is perhaps a wife's
chief task; unless it be to put up with them.
* * *
Often enough the freckled and fringrant girl wins over the professional
beauty.
* * *
Sometimes grown-up girls are just as shy as little ones--and for the
same reasons because there is no one who knows how to play with them.
Girls often play with love as if it were one of the amusements of life;
but a day comes when love proves itself the most sensuous thing on earth.
And
A girl is quick to discover the kind of love that is required of her. As
a rule
Many a girl who has been sore put to it to prove herself whole-hearted.
For of course,
Always every suitor expects whole heartedness. And this every girl
instinctively knows. Indeed,
Is not a half-hearted love, or a half-hearted acceptress of love, a
contradiction in terms?
* * *
A certain measure of the sophisticated or unsophistication of a youthful
damsel may be found in her manner o f receiving the attentions of a
stranger in a station different from her own.
Young women, themselves but rarely unsophisticated, view with a certain
pitying sort of curiosity unsophisticatedness in men. And
A young man's unsophisticatedeness it is a great delight to a woman to
eradicate. Yet
A girl regards with complex emotions the man who has blossomed under the
genial warmth of her rays; the flattery to own powers is counterbalanced
by the evidence of lack of power in him.
* * *
A girl thinks she detects flippancy in seriousness. A woman thinks she
detects seriousness in flippancy.
* * *
What would be conduct decidedly risqué in a city miss, is often innocent
playfulness in a country maid.
* * *
Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, girls play with love as if it
were a doll; very soon after twenty they discover it is a dynamo. This
is why
An early and clandestine engagement often works more havoc than
happiness. For
Either, one of the parties to the concealed compact receives or pays
attention which perturb the other; or, a subsequent and acknowledged
lover looks askance at the previous entanglement. Since even if
A clandestine engagement (as is usually the case) is merely a flirtation
with the emoluments which accompany a promise to marry, those emoluments
are not nice things for a subsequent and avowed lover, whether masculine
or feminine, to think upon. Lastly,
A laxity with regard to the claims of courtship is apt to breed a laxity
with regard to the claims of wedlock. In short,
Flirtations, like clandestine engagements, are an affront to love.
Accordingly
To the engagement-ring should be as attached as much importance as to the
wedding-ring. Indeed,
A difficult and a delicate path it is that a girl has to tread through
life--and often enough a dangerous. Yet with extraordinary deftness she
treads it. She must win her a mate, yet has to pretend that the mate
wins her. She makes believe to be captured, yet has herself to be intent
on the chase. To be wooed and wedded is the law of her being, yet not
for one moment dares she to exhibit too great an alacrity to obey that
law; for she knows instinctively that an easy victory prognosticates a
fickle victor. Is she abundantly endowed with the very attributes that
make for wife-and mother-hood, a strong and swaying passion and an
affection unbounded, she must hold them in leash with exemplary patience;
for, alas! Are they given the rein for a single passing moment, instead
of being accounted unto her for righteousness, they work her ruin. She
must win her one man, and she must win him for life; but she cannot pick
or choose, for she must wait to be asked.
If she make test of many admirers, she is described as a flirt; if,
conscientious and demure, she await her fate, a desirable fate is by no
means assured.
In truth it seems that too often a girl must dissemble--hateful as
dissemblance in men. T'is a hard road indeed that a girl has to travel.
To win her a fellow-farer for life, she must go out of her way to
accommodate so many travelers: and this one is lured by this, and that
one by that, and another by something unnoticed by the throng. But, an
she dissembles one iota too much, her fellow-farers look askance, and he
who eventually joins her for good upbraids her for that by which she won.
Dissemblance is indeed at once the boon and the bane of a girl: without
it, she thinks to be overlooked (often enough a preposterous assumption);
with it, she is looked upon too much. And always,
Always a girl has to pretend that never did she descend to dissemblance.
--Which, nevertheless, is sometimes absolutely true, for
Just now and then there happens that miracle of miracles, where their
flames up in the man, and their flames up in the maid, in both at once,
unaided and unlooked-for, that divine and supra-mundane spark which
smolders lambent in every youthful breast: when maid and man take mutual
fire at touch of hands and look of eyes,--fire lit at that vestal altar
which knows no source and burns for aye.