Helen Rowland

“ Why does she make a solemn and important engagement without the slightest intention of keeping it? Why does she put on open-work stockings and gaudy shoes and hold her frock as high as she dares—and then annihilate you if you stare at her? Why does she use everything as it was not intended to be used—a hairpin to pick a lock, a buttonhook to open a can, a hairbrush to hammer a nail, a hatpin to rob a letter box, a razor to sharpen a pencil and a cup and saucer to decorate the mantelpiece? Why [36] does she gush over the woman she hates worst and snub the man she is dying to marry? ”

“ Now, the man or woman who marries for money——" [63]
"Earns it," broke in the widow fervently. "Earns it by the sweat of the brow. The man who marries a woman for her money is a white slave, a bond servant, a travesty on manhood. For every dollar he receives he gives a full equivalent in self-respect and independence, and all the things dearest to a real man."
"A real man," remarked the bachelor, taking out his pipe and lighting it, "wouldn't marry a woman for her money. It's woman to whom marriage presents the alluring financial prospect." ”

“ Some of the most selfish men in the world are those whom a poor little woman will work her fingers to the bone to support, simply because when she comes home at night after her labors her husband puts his arms around her and tells her how sad it makes him feel to see her struggle so, and how young and beautiful she keeps in spite of it all and orders her to lie down and let him run out and fetch her some ice cream and read to her. A man with that sort of way with him can get anything on earth out of a woman and then make her eternally grateful to him. ”

“ Whatever woman a man marries, he invariably spends his life sighing for something different. If he is tied to a nice, soft sofa pillow, he longs for a backbone. If he marries a parlor ornament, he yearns for a kitchen utensil. If his [14] wife has a Greek nose, he discovers afterward that what he really admires is pugs. If he picks out red hair or black, he will go blocks out of his way to pursue every yellow glint that catches his eye. And if he married a whole harem at once he would discover that what he really wanted was monogamy, and a single wife with a single idea. ”

“ Her [159] morals may be as crooked and dark as a lane at midnight; but if her manners are smooth and gentle and guileless and tender she can deceive the cleverest man alive into believing her a nun. It isn't what she says but how she says it that counts. There are some women who could read your death warrant or repeat the multiplication table in such a confiding voice and with such a tender glance that you would want to take them in your arms and thank them for it. ”

“ And you never can tell by the way a man acts before marriage how he will come out in the wash of domesticity, or stand the wear and tear of matrimony. It's usually the most brilliant and catchy patterns of manhood that turn out to be cotton-backed after the gloss of the honeymoon has worn off. ”

“ A man can get as accustomed to a woman as he does to a pipe or a chair——"
"What!"
"And a woman," pursued the bachelor, "can become as attached to a man and as fond of him as she is of an old umbrella or a pair of old shoes that have done good service. No matter how battered or worn they may become, nor how many breaks there are in them, we can never find anything to quite take their place. Matrimony, after all, is just a habit; and husbands and wives become habits—habits that however disagreeable they may be we don't want to part with. ”

“ And have you never seen a magnificent, six-foot-two specimen of masculine humanity, who was first in war and first everywhere but in his own home, where he was afraid to put his feet on a chair or light a pipe or make an original remark, because some little dried-up runt of a woman had him hypnotized into believing that he was the thirty-second vertebræ and she all the rest of the bones and sinew of the human race? ”

“ But the trouble is that most of us men haven't any big criminal tendencies, merely a heap of little follies and weaknesses that there isn't any particular virtue in sacrificing or any particular harm in keeping."
"And which you always do keep, in spite of all your New Year's vows," remarked the widow ironically.
"Huh!" The bachelor laughed cynically. "It's our New Year's vows that help us to keep 'em. The very fact that a fellow has sworn to forego anything, whether it's a habit or a girl, makes it more attractive. ”

“ The widow [88] became suddenly interested in the arrangement of the fringe on the satin sofa pillow. "But it isn't the man who asks a woman for a kiss or—or anything—who gets it. It's the man who takes for granted."
"Takes—what?"
"Takes her by surprise, Mr. Travers," explained the widow, "and doesn't give her time to think or to say no. The short cut to managing a woman is not argument or reason. It's action. She may like to be coaxed, but it's the man who orders her about whom she admires—and obeys. ”

“ Why does she put a new feather on her hat and a new kink in her hair, and expect a man to notice it as quickly and be as astonished as he would if she had shaved her head or lost a limb? Why does she seem offended if you don't make love to her, and then get angry if you do? ”

“ It isn't how not to do things but how to do them that is important to a woman. It isn't what she does but how she does it that matters. She may commit a highway murder or low down burglary; and if she does it in a ruffled skirt and a picture hat any man will forgive her. ”

“ All men have ideals—but they don't often marry them. The trouble is that when a man has the marrying fever he can clothe anything in curls and petticoats with the illusions he has built around that ideal, and put the ideal's halo on her head and imagine she is the real thing. He can look at a red-headed, pug-nosed girl from an angle that will make her hair seem pure gold and her pug look Greek. ”

“ The widow nodded.
"Nor give him a bitter taste in the mouth in the morning. A good wife is like a dose of medicine—hard to swallow, but truly helpful. The girls who wear frills and high heels and curly pompadours are like the salad with the most dressing and garnishing, likely to be too rich and spicy, while the plain little thing in the serge skirt, who never powders her nose, may prove as sweet and wholesome—as—as home-made pudding."
"Or—home-made pickles," suggested the bachelor with wry face. ”

“ But, unfortunately, the average man is just an ungainly looking thing in a derby hat and hideous clothes, with knuckly hands and padded shoulders and a rough chin."
"Thank you," said the bachelor sweetly. "I see—as in a looking glass. Evidently our countenances—"
"Pooh!" jeered the widow, "your countenances just don't count. That's all. What profiteth it a man though he have the face of an Apollo if he have the legs of a Caliban? A woman never bothers about a man's face. It's his figure that attracts her. ”

“ When he woke up—I beg your pardon—after they had broken off, he never could abide the smell of roses."
"I suppose," said the widow, holding her muff against her cheek sentimentally, "it reminded him of all the tender little tête-à-têtes and moonlight nights and the way her hair curled about her forehead and the way she used to smile at him, and of her gloves and her ruffles and the color of her eyes and——"
"It didn't!" said the bachelor emphatically. "It nauseated him. ”

“ A woman is like a darky, who fancies that 'freedom' means three-quarters of the sidewalk, or a small boy who imagines that doing as he pleases means smashing his sister's toys and stealing sweets from the pantry. ”

“ She is a natural miser and she hoards her feelings. A man flings his sentiment about like a prodigal and naturally when it's all gone—there isn't any left."
"Is that when he gets the 'tired [107] feeling?'" inquired the widow sympathetically.
"Yes," said the bachelor, "and nothing is worse than waking up in the morning with a dark brown taste in your mouth—to find the woman standing before you offering you more champagne. But she always does. A woman never seems to know when the logical conclusion of a love affair has arrived. ”

“ You might as well ask why is music, or painting, or pâté de foie gras, or champagne, or ice cream, or anything else charming and delicious—"
"And utterly useless."
"Of course," agreed the widow, leaning back and thoughtfully twisting the bit of lace she called a handkerchief. "It's the utterly useless [34] things that make the world attractive and pleasant to live in—like flowers and bonbons and politics and love—"
"And tobacco," added the bachelor reflectively.
"Woman is the dessert to the feast," went on the widow, "the trimmings on the garment of life, the spice in the pudding. ”

“ The man who swears off loudest on New [174] Year's is usually the one they have to carry home the morning after. And the chap who promises a girl a life of roses is the one who will let her pick all the thorns off for herself."
"Perhaps," sighed the widow, chewing the stem of a violet thoughtfully, "the best way to cure a man of a taste for anything, after all, is to let him have too much of it, instead of making him swear off. If you want him to hate the smell of a pipe insist on his smoking one all the time. ”

“ They have known for ages what the white man never seems to have learned, that the way to take a woman is by storm and the way to hold her is by force and that any man can manage any woman if he only knows how and has the audacity and the courage—What are you trying to do, Mr. Travers? ”

“ Of course, it can be cultivated to a certain extent, like music or Christian Science, but it's hard for a man to learn that a woman is a fragile creature and needs a bodyguard, after he has been twenty years letting his sisters pack their own trunks and lug their own satchels and golf clubs. Besides, most men are too busy or too self-absorbed to cultivate it, if they could."
"Most men," remarked the bachelor, stirring his coffee and lighting his cigarette, "aren't anxious to become the sort of 'mother's darling' you describe."
"Nonsense," retorted the widow. ”

“ But fundamentally they can be divided into two classes, just as automobiles can be divided into gasoline and electric. There is the woman a man wants to marry, the kind that is stamped from birth for wifehood, the even-tempered, steady-going, comfortable kind of girl that you would like to tie to for life and with whom you know you would be perfectly contented—and utterly stupid. Every man has in mind his ideal wife ”

“ The widow smiled patiently.
"Skimpy," she repeated. "There is so little to some men that the cleverest woman couldn't patch them up [120] into a full-sized specimen. They are like the odds and ends left on the remnant counter. You have to do the best you can with them and then use Christian Science to make yourself believe they are all there and that the patches don't show. Haven't you ever seen magnificent women trailing little annexes after them like echoes or—or——"
"Captives in the wake of a conquering queen?" broke in the bachelor. ”

“ She may struggle against the man who attempts to conquer her by main force, but she enjoys being conquered just the same, and it takes a great burden off her soul to be able to lay her head on a broad, masculine shoulder and to know that every affair in life is going to be settled and decided for her. ”

“ The best husbands aren't caught; they're made. And the luckiest woman isn't the one who marries the best man, but the one who makes the most out of the man she marries."
"But," protested the bachelor, "if we're such a lot and such a lottery, why do you marry us at all?"
The widow looked up in surprise and stopped with her cup poised in midair.
"Why do we wear frocks, Mr. Travers?" she asked witheringly. "Why do we pompadour our hair or eat with forks or go to pink teas? Marriage is a custom; and if a woman doesn't marry she is simply non—non——" [127]
"Compos mentis?" ”