Intuition, our own selfhood, is nature’s highest teacher, and infallible; and tells all, by her “still, small voice within,” whether and just wherein they are making love right or wrong. Every false step forewarns all against itself; and great is their fall who stumble. Courtship has its own inherent consciousness, which must be kept inviolate.
Then throw yourself, O courting youth, upon your own interior sense of propriety and right, as to both the beginning and conducting of courtship, after learning all you can from these pages, and have no fears as to results, but quietly bide them, in the most perfect assurance of their happy eventuality!
“What can I do or omit to advance my suit? prevent dismissal? make my very best impression? guarantee acceptance? touch my idol’s heart? court just right?” This is what all true courters say.
Cultivate and manifest whatever qualities you would awaken. You inspire in the one you court the precise feeling and traits you yourself experience. This law effects this result. Every faculty in either awakens itself in the other. This is just as sure as gravity itself. Hence your success must come from within, depends upon yourself, not the one courted.
Study the specialties, likes and dislikes in particular, of the one courted, and humor and adapt yourself to them.
Be extra careful not to prejudice him or her against you by awakening any faculty in reverse. Thus whatever rouses the other’s resistance against you, antagonizes all the other faculties, and proportionally turns love for you into hatred. Whatever wounds ambition reverses all the other feelings, to your injury; what delights it, turns them in your favor. All the faculties create, and their action constitutes human nature; which lovers will do right well to study. To give an illustration:
A Case to the Point.
An elderly man with points in his favor, having selected a woman eighteen years younger, but most intelligent and feminine, had two young rivals, each having more points in their favor, and came to his final test. She thought much of having plenty of money. They saw they could “cut him out” by showing her that he was poor; she till then thinking his means ample. All four met around her table, and proved his poverty. His rivals retired, sure that they had made “his cake dough,” leaving him with her. It was his turning-point. He addressed himself right to her affections, saying little about money matters, but protesting an amount of devotion for her to which she knew they were strangers; and left his suit right on this one point; adding:
“You know I can make money; know how intensely I esteem, admire, idolize, and love you. Will not my admitted greater affection, with my earnings, do more for you than they with more money, but less love?”
Her clear head saw the point. Her heart melted into his. She said “yes.” He triumphed by this affectional spirit alone over their much greater availability.