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 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. This in a measure disperses and softens the responsibility. And one must not be hasty in marking flirtation. There is the seeming and the real, like true and false croup. 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.
In an era when letter-writing is said to be dying out, it is not surprising that love-letters should come under suspicion. Indeed, there have been many temptations to cynicism. The law courts have been invoked to decide whether love-letters belong to the sender or to the receiver; nice questions have grown out of misunderstandings as to proposals of marriage. It is hinted that men are to become revoltingly crafty as to things put upon paper, and that the young lady of a not remote future will receive her lover’s notes moist and blurred from the embrace of a copying book.
The general decrease in the quantity of letter-writing due, among other reasons, to the telephone, the trolley and railroads, and the increased rapidity of life in general, undoubtedly has influenced the mere bulk of sentimental correspondence, though concrete instances are conflicting. One young man of my acquaintance writes to his sweetheart every day. Another, who has been engaged for some months, confessed to writing to the young woman (she lives in another city) once a week; “and do you know,” he said, “I have a deuce of a time to find anything to say!”
Whatever tendency the American girl herself may be willing to foster or accept, it always will be true that the gift for writing the right letter to the right person is one of the most potent known to civilization. There are genuine, warm-hearted charming-mannered men who can write only a brutally dull letter, and there are reprobates who can fill a letter with the aroma of paradise. In an affair beginning with letters the reprobate must have the advantage. Indeed, I knew a girl who went on believing in the author of certain letters after the most disenchanting honeymoon that ever woman endured, after society had looked askance at her, after the towering lie of those letters had cast a blighting shadow across her life.
Thoughts
One pretty and pleasant little woman in Kentucky told me that when she was engaged she sometimes got two letters a day. “And when we were married I missed those letters so!” And this was indubitably a happy marriage. I knew in just what sort of place those letters would be kept, and just how they would be tied up, and could fancy just how she would look in the dim of a rainy day when she brought them forth and spread them out—by the cradle.
Who can tell what passes in the heart of a woman? Who can read her as she reads her letters over there in the corner of the summer hotel verandah? Who can say what she is thinking there in the shadow of the birch-tree picking off the petals? “He loves me—he loves me not”—no, surely something more modern. What could be more piquing than that partnership—nature and a woman? If she chooses to take another member into the firm, that is her affair. If she has a tryst, who shall have the meanness to wish any more or less than that he may not keep her waiting an unseemly time—or that she may not have followed a habit she has, and have gone absently to the wrong place? Yet she may have chosen to walk alone and to let the summer pass and the hectic colors of the dying season flaunt themselves in her face without giving a sign. Who can say what passes in the mind of a woman? When she opens the book of her own heart, and turns to the last page first to see how the thing comes out, is she not puzzled sometimes to find all the print running backward? Who can say, if a fairy came out of the wood, what manner of choice she would ask of that fairy, what fortune she would consider sweetest, what form of man she would ask for her Prince Charming? How small the chance that she knows what she wants, or that if she did know she would regard it as safe and symmetrical not to ask for the opposite?