Flirting

“ And yet the world would be very dull without that innocent kind of nonsense which often goes by the name of flirting—that pleasant something which is more than mere acquaintanceship and less than formal loverhood—that bright and animated intercourse which makes the hours pass so easily, yet which leaves no bitter pang of self-reproach—that indefinite and undefinable interest by which the one man or the one woman becomes a kind of microcosm for the time, the epitome of all that is pleasant and of all that is lovely. ”

“ I do not say that you should always wear a forbidding expression, and should scowl at people who dare to smile at you or otherwise pay homage to your feminine charms. But there is a difference between a friendly expression and flirting. ”

“ Yes, lots of them drink, men and women. And as for flirting—they don’t call it flirting, but in their way I dare say it’s very much the same thing. Only, in our part of the country, a man who flirts, if you call it so, gets just as bad a name as a woman. ”

“ In fact, there is no outward sign nor symbol of flirting which may not be mistaken and turned round, because flirting is so entirely in the intention and not in the mere formula, that it becomes a kind of phantasm, a Proteus, impossible to seize or to depict with accuracy. ”

“ Flirting I take to be the excitement of love, without its reality, and without its ordinary result in marriage. ”

“ Then there is the prudent flirt, who trifles only with married women; dangles after those subtle, handsome creatures who affect 35 blighted lives and uncomfortable husbands, and who, having married for convenience, are flirting for love. Such women are safe entertainment for the cowardly male flirt, who fears a flirtation that leads perchance to matrimony, but who has no fears about his liability to commit bigamy. ”

“ Many women have been accused of flirting who were never more serious in their lives, just as we have known them to be cruelly accused of sincerity at a time when their whimsicality should have been patent to the least intelligent of observers. ”

“ At these last words the lady looked up suddenly into the captain's pleasant face. In her manner there was a faint suggestion of coquetry—so faint as only to be a very pleasing suggestion. Women who have been flirts in former years have this glance, and they never quite lose it. Personally speaking, I like it. There comes from its influence an innocent and very sociable sensation of familiarity with old and young alike. Someday I shall write a learned disquisition on the art and so-called vice of flirting. ”

“ In general, the male flirt is a much less worthy character than the young lady who makes a pastime of flirtation. He is something more than a flirt. In nine cases out of ten, he is a rake as well. His object in flirting is to gratify a mean propensity at the expense of those who are pure and unsophisticated. ”

“ In reply to your inquiry as to whether "there is no harm in flirting," we must tell you that there is a type of flirting which is distinctly vulgar, and does not elevate a girl in the eyes of the man who is amusing himself with her. On the other hand, it is only fair to say that some people apply the term "flirting" to very harmless and innocent gaiety and brightness, which is perfectly natural when young people meet together.
INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENCE.
"Lys de France" writes to inform her many would-be correspondents that she has already made her choice. ”

“ With refined men of the period Flirting, i.e. fascinating and leaving in doubt, is quite as effective in kindling adoration to ecstasy as crude Coyness was with the coarse-fibred men of the past. Flirtation, indeed, is much more tantalising than Coyness, and therefore a complete modern substitute for it. ”

“ Flirting is a horrid outrage upon the most holy and exalted feelings of the human soul, and the most sacred and important relation of life. It is a vulgarism and wickedness to be compared only to blasphemy. It had, and still has, its origin in the basest lust. The refined soul is always disgusted with it. ”

“ A careful study of the science of flirting and its masters and mistresses would probably prove that the greatest—in the sense of artistic skill—flirts are those people who have excitable brains and little imagination. ”

“ A men's favourite of the right sort must, among other things, be well up in the accidence of flirting, and know how to take it at exactly its proper value. She must be able to accept broad compliments, or more subtle love-making, without either too serious an acceptance or too grave a deprecation. ”

“ Some characteristics of the era may not be attributed to anything that is new in our system. Flirtation, for example, is a very old vice. Yet, as every [155] calling has a conscience of its own, I like to think that flirtation has been harshly painted in some respects. If it does not show specific modifications in our longitudes, we must conclude that it is a necessary evil. At any rate we know from more than one biologist that flirting is not solely a human trait. ”

“ We have not the slightest hesitation in pronouncing flirtation as pernicious in the extreme. It exerts a malign influence alike upon the mental, the moral, and the physical constitution of those who indulge it. The young lady who has become infatuated with a passion for flirting, courting the society of young men simply for the pleasure derived from their attentions, is educating herself in a school which will totally unfit her for the enjoyment of domestic peace and happiness should she have all the conditions necessary for such enjoyment other than those which she herself must furnish. ”

“ But what is the use of them? They just take it as a new variety of flirting, and haven’t an idea beyond. It simply means that so long as it amuses them they will go on, and as soon as they are tired, drop it. ”

“ We used to see a vast deal of each other;—flirting, I suppose you would call it; but how are young people to get along without flirting? I liked him very much, for I always had a fancy for handsome men ”

“ After puberty, if not before, there is another form in which the art of love is largely experimented and practised, especially in England and America, the form of flirtation. In its elementary manifestations flirting is entirely natural and normal; we may trace it even in animals; it is simply the beginning of courtship, at the early stage when courtship may yet, if desired, be broken off. Under modern civilized conditions, however, flirtation is often more than this. These conditions make marriage difficult; they make love and its engagements too serious a matter to be entered on lightly ”

“ Meryon, you must know that he absolutely can’t flirt. That’s why I like him.”
“I like flirting,” said Maud; “it’s so desperately interesting. Talking sense is such a desperate bore, you know. It’s all very well for you, my dear girl; men’ll listen to an angel that’s paid a visit to Worth. But with my sallow complexion it’s simply suicidal.”
“Men who flirt are no better than city clerks who kiss their best girls under the mistletoe at [127] suburban tea-parties,” said Angela, elevating her little pointed chin. ”

“ The watchful mother, intent on chances, says that dancing together oftener than is necessary for good breeding and just the amount of attention demanded by circumstances, is flirting; timid girls newly out, and not yet used to 283 the odd ways of men, think they are being flirted with outrageously if their partner fires off the meekest little compliment at them, or looks at them more tenderly than he would look at a cabbage ”

“ I cannot help but love you,
For of all girls I ever knew,
There's none I place above you;
But then you know it's rather hard,
To dangle aimless at your skirt,
And watch your every movement so,
For I am jealous, and you're a flirt.
There's half a score of fellows round,
You smile at every one,
And as I think to pride myself for basking in the sun
Of your sweet smiles, you laugh at me,
And treat me like a lump of dirt,
Until I wish that I were dead,
For I am jealous, and you're a flirt. ”

“ But, and here is the spice of it, at any moment one of the buttons may come off by accident, or be taken off by fraud, and then—well, then certainly a garment may be torn to rags, possibly a heart may be pierced.
Where does flirtation end? you ask. Well, [101] I can tell you where it never ends. It never ends in a row. Never, at any rate, when he or she has more brains than a guinea-pig. Of course, with downright fools there is no telling. If there be ever so slight a row, ever so faint a scandal, then there has been something more than a flirtation. ”

“ THE NOTORIOUS MISS ANSTRUTHER I IT is prejudicial to the nicest girl in this unjust world to be asked in marriage too frequently. Things come out, and she gets the name of being a heartless flirt; her own sex add, that she cannot be a very nice girl. A flirt she is, of a surety, but why heartless, and why not a nice girl? So grave defects do not follow. The flirt who doesn't think she is one—the flirt with a set of sham principles and ideals, and a misleading veneer of soul—is heartless, if you like, and something worse. ”

“ But this is not all the dashing flame of my sea-coal suggests.
—How like a flirt! mused I again, recurring to my first thought—so lively, yet uncertain; so bright yet so flickering! Your true flirt plays with sparkles; her heart, much as there is of it, spends itself in sparkles; she measures it to sparkle, and habit grows into nature, so that anon, it can only sparkle. How carefully she cramps it, if the flames show too great a heat; how dexterously she flings its blaze here and there; how coyly she subdues it; how winningly she lights it! ”

“ Though the practice of flirtation, or the habit of making use of certain arts of pleasing in the society of men, which are not used in that of women, is a thing of such frequent occurrence, that few can be said to be wholly exempt from it; yet we rarely find a woman so lost to all sense of delicacy, as to make an open profession of flirtation. Indeed, I am convinced, that some do actually practise it unconsciously to themselves, and for this reason I am the more anxious to furnish them with a few hints, by which they may be better able to detect the follies of their own conduct. ”

“ In one case only does it admit of no extenuating circumstances,—that of the married flirt of both sexes.
A flirt may not indeed be an altogether lovely character, even with all her alluring faults; but she is something a great deal nicer than a prude. All men prefer a woman who trusts them, or gayly challenges them to a combat, in which she proposes their capture, to her who affects horror at masculine tastes and ways, and is always expecting them to do some improper, or say some dreadful, thing. ”

“ For the married flirt’s first instinct is to divest all other women of that air of romance with which the nobility and chivalry of men have invested womanhood for centuries. So she points out with a pitiless exactness all the small arts which other women use; and is not only a rival to some young girl, but a traitor to her whole sex. ”

“ It was a flirtation without the benefits of a flirtation. She was too old to let him fall in love with her, which might have done him good; and her inclination was to keep him young, so that the nonsense he talked might never transgress a certain line. ”

“ In certain individuals, flirtation takes the place of coitus from the sensual, and love from the sentimental point of view. There are modern crazy natures who spend their existence in all kinds of artificial excitation of the senses, creatures of both sexes incapable of a useful action.
[103] As a momentary and transient expression of all the necessities of love, flirtation has a right to existence; but, when cultivated on its own account and always remaining as flirtation, it becomes a symptom of degeneration or sexual depravity, among idle, crazy and vicious persons of all kinds. ”

“ Even if I did flirt with you at Auchinleven to amuse myself, you had no right to take my teasing seriously—you, who are such an experienced flirt and philanderer, and who do not expect women to take your love-making seriously and laugh at them if they do. ”

“ Flirts are of many kinds as well as of all degrees. There are quiet flirts and demonstrative flirts; flirts of the subtle sort whose practice is made by the eyes alone, by the manner, by the tender little sigh, by the bend of the head and the wave of the hand, to give pathos and point to the otherwise harmless word; and flirts of the open and rampant kind, who go up quite boldly towards the point, but who never reach it, taking care to draw back in time before they fairly cross the border. ”

“ Clever it may be, but it is a definition of Coquetry not of Flirtation. For Flirtation never excludes possible intentions.
Flirtation versus Coyness.—Flirtation, from the feminine point of view, may be defined as the art of fascinating a man and leaving him in doubt whether he is loved or not. There is no reason why a beautiful and bright girl should not charm, i.e. flirt with, every man who interests her, and to whom she has been properly introduced. No reason why she should not dispense her sweet smiles with complete impartiality, until she has made up her 124mind whom she wishes to marry. ”

“ It is not without good reason that special balls and parties have come into 79 fashion for social buds; they are the necessary sequence to the predominance of married sirens, with whom in a mixed society no young girl can cope. They have the floor and the partners; they monopolize all the attention, and their pleasure is of the greatest importance. And their pleasure is to flirt—to flirt in all places and at all hours.
In vain will some young aspirant to marriage display in the presence of the married flirt her pretty accomplishments. ”

“ It amused her to do it, and she knew perfectly well what she really meant. She never meant to be sincere; she never dreamed she could be. She 's a ferocious flirt, and why a flirt 's a flirt is more than I can tell you now. ”