The Spinster Book Part 9

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 pa.s.sed. 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 courts.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.s 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 advis.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.ses 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 pet.i.te 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 fiances 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sing 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 s.h.i.+fting 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

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion is too sacred to be hidden from the eagle eye of the public.

The death of anyone of more than pa.s.sing 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 ma.n.u.script 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 ma.n.u.script.

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]