Mademoiselle recoils in disgust. This, then, is what she has been waiting for. It is not at all like the book. Her lover is entirely different from other girls' lovers—so different that he is pathetic.
Her faith in the gospel of romance is sadly shaken, when the next experience is a great deal like the first. No one, in the book, could doubt the lover's meaning. Yet in the halting sentences and confused metaphors of actual experience, there is sometimes much question as to what he really means. A girl often has to ask a man if he has just proposed to her, that she may accept or refuse, in a gracious and proper way.
The Ordeal
In a girl's early ideas on the subject, she has much sympathy for the man who has to undergo the ordeal of asking a woman to be his wife. She thinks he must contemplate the momentous step for weeks, await the opportunity with expectant terror, and when his lady is in a happy mood, recite with fear and trembling, the proposal which he has written out and learned, appropriately enough, by heart.
Later, she comes to know that after the first few times, men propose as thoughtlessly and easily as they dress for dinner, that they devote no particular study to the art, that constant practice makes them proficient, and that almost any girl will do when the proposal mood is on.
She discovers that they often do it simply to make a pleasing impression upon a girl, with no thought of acceptance. Many an engagement is more of a surprise to the man than to anybody else.
Because fiction comes very near to the heart of woman, she invariably follows its dictates and shows great astonishment at every proposal. The women who have been thus surprised are even more rare than days in June.
The False and the True
When a man begins to compare a girl to a flower, a baby, or a kitten, she knows what is coming next. She spends her mental energy in distinguishing the false from the true—which is sufficient employment for anyone. There is not enough cerebral tissue to waste much of it upon unnecessary processes.
It is very hard to tell whether a man really means a proposal. It may have been made under romantic circumstances, or because he was lonesome for the other girl, or, in the case of an heiress, because he was tired of work. Longing for the absent sweetheart will frequently cause a man to become engaged to someone near by, because, though absence may make a woman's heart grow fonder, it is presence that plays the mischief with a man. No wise girl would accept a man who proposed by moonlight or just after a meal. The dear things aren't themselves then.