Threads of Grey and Gold

by Myrtle Reed

When you do come to see us, it is not at all nice to spend the entire evening talking about some other girl. How would you like to have the graces of some other man continually dinned into your ears? Sometimes we take that way in order to get a rest from your overweening raptures over the absent girl.

We have a well-defined suspicion that you talk us over with your chums and compare notes. But, bless you, it can’t possibly hold a candle to the thorough and impartial discussions that some of you get when girls are together, either in small bevies, or with only one chosen friend. And we don’t very much care what you say about us, for a man never judges a woman by the opinion of any one else, but another woman’s opinion counts for a great deal with us, so you would better be careful.

If you are going to say things that you don’t mean, try to stamp them with the air of sincerity—if you can once get a woman to fully believe in your sincerity, you have gone a long way toward her heart.

Haven’t you found out that women are not particularly interested in anecdotes? Please don’t tell us more than fifteen in the same evening.

And don’t begin to make love to us before you have had time to make a favourable impression along several lines—a man, as well as a woman, loses ground and forfeits respect by making himself too cheap.

If a girl runs and screams when she has been caught standing under the mistletoe, it means that she will not object; if she stiffens up and glares at you, it means that she does. The same idea is sometimes delicately conveyed by the point of a pin. But a woman will be able to forgive almost anything which you can make her believe was prompted by her own attractiveness, at least unless she knows men fairly well.

You know, of course, that we will not show your letters, nor tell when you ask us to marry you and are refused. This much a woman owes to any man who has honoured her with an offer of marriage—to keep his perfect trust sacredly in her own heart. Even her future husband has no business to know of this—it is her lover’s secret, and she has no right to betray it.

Keeping the love-letters and the offers of marriage from any honourable man safe from a prying world are points of honour which all good women possess, although we may sometimes quote certain things from your letters, as you do from ours.

There’s nothing you can tell a woman which will please her quite so much as that knowing her has made you better, especially if you can prove it by showing a decided upward tendency in your morals. That’s your good right bower, but don’t play it too often—keep it for special occasions.

There’s one mistake you make, dear brethren, and that is telling a woman you love her as soon as you find it out yourself, and the most of you will do that very thing. There is one case on record where a man waited fifteen minutes, but he nearly died of the strain. The trouble is that you seldom stop to consider whether we are ready to hear you or not, nor whether the coast is clear, nor what the chances are in your favour. You simply relieve your mind, and trust in your own wonderful charms to accomplish the rest.