"But if it hadn't been worth it, Taffy? Suppose you were air-sick?" Leslie had suggested. "Worse, suppose you were Paul-sick?"
"What?"
"Yes, supposing that Super-Boy of yours himself was the disappointment? Suppose none of his 'little ways' happened to please you? Men don't realise it, but, in love, a man is much easier to please than a woman!"
"No, Leslie. No," had come from the girl who knew nothing of love-making—less than nothing, since she thought she knew.
Leslie had persisted. "The first pet-name a man calls you—awfully important, that!—may hash up Love's young dream for ever. Some men, I believe, begin with 'Dear old—something or other.' That's the end. Or something that you know you're obviously not. Such as 'Little Woman,' to me. Or they don't notice something that's specially there for them to notice. That's unforgivable. Or they do notice something that's quite beside the mark. Or they repeat themselves. Not good enough, a man who can't think of one new way of saying he cares, each day. (Even a calendar can do that.) Saying the wrong thing, though, isn't as bad as being silent. That's fatal. Gives a girl such a lot of time to imagine all the things that another man might have been saying at the time. That's why men with no vocabularies ought never to get engaged or married. 'I'm a man of few words,' they say. They ought to be told, 'Very well. Outside! It simply means you won't trouble to amuse me.' Exit the Illusion.
'Alas, how easily things go wrong!
A look too short, or a kiss too long——'
(Especially with a look too short.) Yes," Leslie had concluded impressively, "suppose the worst tragedy happened? Suppose the Dampier boy did get engaged to you, and then you found out that he didn't in the least know how to make love? To make love to you, I mean."
"There wouldn't have to be any love 'made,'" little Gwenna had murmured, flushing. "Where he was, the love would be."
"My dear, you are what Hugo Swayne calls 'a Passé-iste' in love. Why, why wasn't I brought up in the heart of the mountains (and far away from any other kind of heart) until I was twenty-two, and then hurled into a love-affair with the first decent-looking young man?" Leslie had cried, with exaggerated envy. "The happier you! But, Taff, do remember that 'Love is a Lad with Wings'—like yours. Even if the engagement were all your fancy painted, that Grand Firework Display sort of feeling couldn't last. Don't shoot! It's true. People couldn't go on living their lives and earning their livings and making their careers and having their babies if it did last. It must alter. It must die down into the usual dear old sun rising every morning. So, when your 'Oiseau de feu' married you, and you found he was just—a husband, like everybody else's——"
"Not 'like' anybody!"—indignantly.