It gives to woman's curiosity a curious pleasure to compare the methods of men's proposals.
In love, a woman is generally cool enough to calculate pros and cons; a man, in similar plight, is incapable of anything but folly.
* * *
It is a feminine motto that a woman needs to be taught how to love. Perhaps she does; but most men will think one private tutor ought to suffice, and that tutor ought to be he. At all events,
The last schoolmaster would be apt to regard with somewhat mixed feelings the tuition of previous crammers.
Why go to the trouble of explaining away a first love, if the second is no whit its inferior? Unless it be to overcome.
What a second love chiefly deplores is: that it was not he (or she) who first taught his (or her) loved one to love. Is it not true also that
It is the first love that amazes, that beautifies, that consecrates?
(An illicit love beautifies and consecrates nothing:
A Maud leaves the daisies rosy; not so Faustine.)