The second contrivance to which he is apt to fall a victim is the infatuation trap. This is a much more elaborate machine, and is worked by one of those semi-attached couples who might sit to a new Hogarth for a new edition of Marriage á la Mode. The husband's part is very simple. It is to be as little in the way as possible, and to afford his sprightlier half every facility for pursuing her little game. The chief business devolves on the lady. It is her task to make the pigeon fall madly in love with her, and to keep him so, without overstepping the bounds of conventional propriety. Happily this can be managed nowadays without either elopement or scandal. Among the improvements of this mechanical age, it has been found possible to enlarge the limits of wedlock so as to include a third person.
A life-long tête-á-tête, which was the old conception of marriage, is quite obsolete. It has given way to the triangular theory, by which a new element, in the shape of a parasitical adorer, has been introduced into the holy state. Matrimony, as reconstituted by fashionable scholiasts, comprises husband, wife, and, to relieve the tedium of the situation, a good-looking appendage of the male sex, who is an agreeable companion of the one and the devoted slave of the other. Each contributes to the harmony of the arrangement—the husband, a background; the wife, the charms of her presence; the adorer, cash. Whatever other experience it brings, marriage generally sharpens the appreciation of the value of money; sentiment is sweet, but it is an article of confectionery, for which its fair dispensers in the married ranks exact an equivalent.
In trapping her victim, therefore, a sharp young matron is careful to let her choice fall on a plump specimen of the pigeon species—a pigeon with a long purse and little brains. Once reduced to a state of infatuation, almost anything may be done with him. The luxury of plucking him will employ her delicate fingers for a long time to come. He may be sponged upon to any extent. The one thing he can do really well is to pay. His yacht, his drag, his brougham, his riding-horses, his shooting-box, all are at her disposal. At his expense she dines at Greenwich; at his expense she views the Derby; at his expense she enjoys an opera-box. And in return for all this she has only to smile and murmur "so nice," for the soft simpleton to fancy himself amply repaid. Then she exacts a great many costly presents, to say nothing of gloves, trinkets, and bouquets. It is curious to note how the code of propriety has altered in this particular.
In old-fashioned novels the stereotyped dodge for compromising a lady's reputation is to force a present or a loan of money on her. Nowadays Lovelace's anxiety is just the other way—to keep the acquisitive propensity of his liege lady within tolerable bounds. It would be a great mistake to suppose that a woman can play this game without special gifts and aptitudes for it. It requires peculiar talents, and peculiar antecedents. First and foremost, she must have married a man whom she both dislikes and despises. And, further, she must be proof against the weakness which some of her sex exhibit, of growing fond of husbands who, without being Admirable Crichtons, treat them kindly and with forbearance. Next, she must have thrown overboard all the twaddle about domestic duties and responsibilities. If her child sickens of the measles just as she is starting for her bivouac in Norway, or a course of dinners in the Palais Royal, her duty is to call in the doctor and go. Weeks afterwards you will find the little darling picking up flesh, in mamma's absence, at some obscure watering-place. Then her temperament must be cool, calculating, and passionless in no ordinary degree, and this character is written in the hard lines of her mouth and the cold light of her fine eyes.
Lastly, she must have, not a superstitious, but an intelligent regard for the world's opinion, or rather for the opinion of the influential part of it. No one has a nicer perception of the difference in the relative importance of stupid country gossip and ostracism from certain great houses in London. No one takes more pains to study appearances so long as they don't clash with her amusements. Indeed, you will generally find that her dear friend is a young lady of great simplicity and irreproachable principles, whom she admits just enough, but not too far, into her confidence, and who finds it worth while to enact the part, now of a blind, and now of a foil.
If any one asserts that this treatment of the human pigeon is cruel, we can only reply, with a correspondent of the Times who writes to rebuke the humanitarians who would rob a poor boa of his squealing rabbit—away with such cant! Is a married woman to be stinted of her "small pleasures" because prudes affect to think the means by which they are obtained unfeminine? As well might they think it unfeline in pussy to play with her mouse.
The walking pigeon is as much intended for the prey of a stronger species as the pigeon that flies. The plucking which he receives at the hands of his fair manipulator is nothing to what he would get at the hands of his own sex, in the army, on the turf, or in the city. If the pigeon has reason to think himself lucky in faring no worse, the non-pigeon section of society has no less reason to be grateful for a new illustration of female character. Not that the mercenary development in some of our young matrons is altogether new. It is only an old domestic virtue, carried to an extreme—thrift, running into an engaging rapacity.
