On rendering slight services.
Should a man be so fortunate as to be of some service to any lady in the street, such as picking up a parcel or sunshade she may have dropped, or helping her out of any small difficulty, he must raise his hat and withdraw at once. Such trifling acts as these do not by any means constitute an acquaintanceship, and to remain by her side when the incident is over would look like presuming on what he had done, as though it gave him a right to her continued acknowledgments. This would be ungentlemanly.
At the same time, these occurrences are sometimes deliberately planned by girls and women with a direct view to scraping acquaintance with young men.
On girls making advances.
It is scarcely necessary to say that girls who stoop to this kind of manœuvring are hardly ever gentlewomen. Members of good families have been known to do such things in the wild exuberance of youth and high spirits, but they cannot hope to retain the respect of those who know them when they deliberately lower themselves in such ways as these.
The risk to one’s good name.
Picking up promiscuous male acquaintances is a practice fraught with danger. It cannot be denied that girls of the lower middle classes are often prone to it; and there are thousands of young men who have no feminine belongings in the great towns and cities where they live, and who are found responsive to this indiscriminating mode of making acquaintances.
The method can produce little good.
But they must often hesitate before choosing as wife a girl who shows so little discretion as to walk and talk with young men of whom she knows nothing beyond what they choose to tell her.
Seaside “Flirtations.”