ABOUT ATTRACTING HUSBANDS.
Men have, since the world began, been angled for deliberately by girls, and times out of count have been caught.
Girls will continue to fish for husbands, and will continue to catch them as long as marriage is a fashion—a state likely to coincide with the length of time the world lasts.
But for all that, it need not be asserted, as it so often is, that all girls angle. Why should the word be used, moreover, with such bitterness? Surely it is not wrong of girls to behave charmingly and make themselves look attractive and pretty, and especially so in the eyes of those men for whose good opinion they are most anxious? If they were to wear sackcloth and go about veritable kill-joys, is it likely that they would succeed in winning what they want?
It is said that love is never evenly distributed, and that in every engaged couple there is more love on one side than on the other. Women fall in love with the opposite sex just as often as the opposite sex does with them. What is to happen if a girl sees a man she believes she could fondly love, and whom she is sure would fondly love her, if she is debarred from angling for him?
A girl may not propose to a man. She may not put to him the anxious question, “Do you love me?” From her lips it would be unpardonable were the tender pleading, “Will you marry me?” to proceed. But she sees one whom she has good reason to think she could wed and be happy with, and the sole step she can rightly take to bring about a declaration of love from him is just this: She can make herself so pleasant and fascinating that he falls in love with her, and asks her that sweet question she has so deeply longed to hear from him.
The feminine angler should be very cautious. Let her declare her purpose—should it be only by a startled word—and a hundred eyes will dart scorn at her, a hundred tongues condemn her. She who is wise, however, is careful—both for the sake of the man she loves and her own reputation—that the little wiles she practices shall appeal only to him, and shall not be observable by those onlookers who are popularly supposed to see most of the game. Women are undoubtedly endowed with a special measure of instinct, and are therefore able to accomplish wonders, apparently never planned or premeditated. Woe be it to the swain who does not want to fall in love, should some fair daughter of Eve will that he shall!
There is this to console him, however: that the said daughter of Eve, should she be discreet and diplomatic, will so work matters that the happy man will never guess that he has been singled out for preference. He will take the bait and greedily swallow it, all the time under the impression that he was the angler, and that it was only after the greatest struggle that he managed to land his prize.
He will be as proud of his achievement as he can be—that is to say, if the girl who has caught him has been very canny during her maneuvers. She need not be deceitful, nor forward, nor unwomanly, nor any of the other plain-spoken and objectionable epithets applied to the feminine angler.
As has been pointed out, she need merely be a tactful, purposeful, clever girl, one who, knowing her own powers to charm, exercises them for the most valuable end and aim life offers—that of forming a home in which two persons may be happy, and from which they may radiate a sufficiency of joy to make the world about it more contented and felicitous than it was before.
Do marriages arranged as an outcome of the angling principle turn out well? Does the fascinating little woman whose bright eyes, pretty ways and dainty dress won her a husband, having secured what she desired, make for the man whose helpmeet she has elected to be a good wife? If she does, a dozen to one he will never find out that he was caught; or if she in some sweet moment should divulge to him the secret, and tell him in whispers and with shy kisses, how she did her best to draw him to her, he will, with further kisses, solemnly declare unto her his delight and gratitude that she so thoughtfully and cleverly made things easy for a blundering idiot like himself.
On the contrary, should she abandon every effort to please directly or soon after the golden circlet is firmly on her finger, how rapidly will his eyes be opened to all the crude and ugly scheming she employed to secure him! How bitterly will he rue the weak moment in which he succumbed to her blandishments. Then will the memory of her charming little speeches and sweet little ways be dust and ashes to him. He will cease to believe in women, taught by his captor to distrust the sex for her sake.
There is all the difference in the world between the girl who angles honestly, so that a happy union may be had with the man she loves, and the girl who angles simply for the achievement of some tribute to her vanity—a wealthy husband, a husband with more money than her friend’s husband possesses, or a husband who will give her a title and position.
There are few women so purely calculating that, once having achieved their object, they can deliberately show themselves in their true colors. Captious, irritable, ill-tempered, untidy—all these distressing characteristics they may reveal to their miserable husbands later, but for the first few weeks of marriage they rarely unmask. It is when the home is settled into, and the regular routine of existence begins, that the test is fairly made.
The admirable angler now shows herself in her true colors. She means to be a good housekeeper, so she studies her husband’s likes and dislikes, and incontestably, though silently, demonstrates to him that since he hates bacon he shall not have it every morning. Above all, she reflects, and recollects, and realizes that what he loved her for in those very early days, when first she taught him to grow fond of her, were her pretty ways. And who shall say, with so glorious a result as this winning woman shall achieve, that she was wrong in her girlhood to be an angler?
If there were more of them! But there are more than is imagined. Only it is the happy country that has no history, and the successful angler that has no historian.