Buch lesen: «A Guide to Men: Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl», Seite 5
WIDOWS
A WIDOW is a fascinating being with the flavor of maturity, the spice of experience, the piquancy of novelty, the tang of practiced coquetry, and the halo of one man's approval.
Second mourning is that interesting period, at which a widow continues to weep with one eye while she begins to flirt with the other.
When a widow comes in at the door, a debutante's chances fly out of the window.
No matter how many wrinkles a widow may have in her face, she always has enough at her fingertips to offset them.
Even a dead husband gives a widow some advantage over a spinster; the very debts her husband left afford her something to boast about to the unmarried woman who has only her own board bills to pay.
A girl takes a man for better or for worse – but a widow merely takes him for granted.
Girls are the milk and honey which sweeten a man's life; widows, the caviare and wine which relieve its flatness and give it spice and piquancy.
A girl knows exactly what kind of man she wants to marry; but a widow knows all the kinds she doesn't want to marry, and usually makes a safe selection by the wise process of elimination.
A widow's chief consolation in remarrying is probably that she finds it less exhausting to sit up and wait for one man to come home evenings, than to sit up and wait for a lot of them to go home.
Widows have all the honor and glory without any of the trials of matrimony; a live husband may be a necessity, but a dead one is a luxury.
Matrimony is the price of love – widowhood, the rebate.
IMPROVISATIONS
SPRING flowers are like spring love, so sweet and tender, but doomed to fade quickly; it's in the autumn of life, or of the year, that we get the hardy variety of either.
A man may honestly admire a superior woman; but when it comes to marrying, he usually looks about for something far enough beneath him to enjoy being ordered about and patted on the head.
A girl's heart is like her dressing-table – crowded with tenderly cherished little souvenirs of love; a man's, like his pipe, is carefully cleaned and emptied after each flame has gone out.
A man doesn't ask a girl to "name the day" any more; he merely pleads guilty to loving her and then closes his eyes while she passes sentence on him and decide when he shall begin "serving time."
When a woman reforms she bleaches her conscience down to the roots as she does her hair; a man simply gives his a coat of whitewashing so that he will have a nice, clean space in which to begin all over again.
When a bachelor sniffs through his letters before opening them in the morning, it is not a sign that he is looking for dynamite, but that he is looking for a note bearing a brand of sachet which he has mistaken for some girl's "sweet personality."
At the awakening from love's young dream the woman's first thought is, "How can I break his heart?" The man's, "How can I break away?"
A man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through her imagination, and then they both speak of it as an affair of "the heart."
No, Clarice, a man's idea of being loved isn't exactly being followed around with a hot water bottle, a box of pills and the eternal question: "Do you love me as much as ever?"
One grass widow doesn't make a summer resort – but she can always make it interesting.
When a man has baggy trousers nowadays it is from falling on his knees to an automobile – not to a girl.
A black lie always shows up against the dazzling background of truth; it's all the little white ones a man keeps telling you that can't be spotted or distinguished from the rest of his conversation.
The only time when a sense of humor profits a woman anything is when she can laugh at herself for having tried to charm a man by dazzling him with it.
Most men fall in love with a sudden jolt, and wake up to find that they are married to an "impulse."
It's a lame love that has to be carried through the honeymoon in a three-thousand-dollar touring car.
In the mathematics of a bachelor one kiss makes a flirtation, two kisses make one conquest, three kisses make a love-affair and four kisses make one tired.
There are "chain-smokers" who light one cigarette from the dying end of another – and there are also "chain lovers" who light one flame from the dying embers of another.
Eve had one advantage over all the rest of her sex. In his wildest moments of rage Adam never could accuse her of being "just like her mother!"
Every woman has a different notion of an ideal husband; but every woman's ideal lover is the same impossible combination of saint and devil, brute and baby, hero and mollycoddle, that never is seen anywhere off the stage or outside the pages of a "best thriller."
Love is a voyage of discovery, marriage the goal – and divorce the relief expedition.
A man never can comprehend why a woman can't understand how he can be dead in love with one girl and acutely alive to the charms of a lot of others at the same time.
Jealousy is the tie that binds – and binds – and binds.
It is not the fear of being shipwrecked that keeps a bachelor from embarking on the sea of matrimony; it is the awful horror of being becalmed.
Nowadays most women grow old gracefully; most men, disgracefully.
A man can forgive a woman for having made a fool of herself over any man on earth – except himself.
Eternity: The interval between the time when a woman discovers that a man is in love with her and the time when he finds it out himself and tells her about it.
The follies which a man regrets the most, in his life, are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.
In the average man's opinion the command, "Thou shalt not steal," does not apply to a kiss, a heart, an umbrella, an hotel or an after-dinner story.
To a woman the first kiss is just the end of the beginning; to a man, it is the beginning of the end.
The qualities a man seeks in a bride no more resemble those he will want in a wife than a cabaret rag-ditty resembles a lullaby, but two years ahead is farther than any man can see when he is looking into a pretty girl's eyes.
YOU MAY GROOM, YOU MAY POLISH HIM UP AS YOU WILL,BUT THE MARK OF THE "M A R R I E D M A N" CLINGS TO HIM STILL
WIDOWERS
THE tenderest, most impressionable thing on earth is the heart of a yearling widower.
Of course it is easier to marry a widower than a bachelor. A man who has been through the Armageddon of one marriage has no spirit of battle left in him.
When a widow begins curling her hair, again, or a widower begins worrying about his thinness on top, Cupid chuckles and gets out his arrows and Satan smiles behind his hand.
In the matrimonial market a seasoned bachelor is just a shop-worn remnant; a divorcé is a cast-off, second-hand article; but a widower is a treasured heirloom inherited only through death.
After his wedding day, a man usually tucks all the flattering adjectives and tender nothings in his vocabulary away in a pigeon-hole and marks them "Not to be opened until widowerhood."
Perhaps there may not be so much excitement in marrying a widower; but there is a lot more comfort in getting something that another woman has broken to double harness than in lashing yourself to a bucking bronco fresh from the wild.
No matter how unhappy a man may have been with his first wife nothing on earth will make him flatter her successor by acknowledging that she was not a combination of Circe, St. Cecilia and the Venus di Milo.
The girl who marries a widower may be a sort of "second edition," but the girl who marries a seasoned bachelor is apt to be a forty-second edition.
When a widower vows he will "never marry again," listen for the wedding bells! The "Never-agains" are the easiest fruit in the Garden of Love. It's the "Never-at-alls!" who are harder than a newsboy's conscience, colder than yesterday's kiss, and less impressionable than a boarding-house steak.
If a woman could foresee how irresistible her husband would look with a bereaved expression on his face and a black band on his coat sleeve, it would give her the strength to live forever.
Some widowers are bereaved – others, relieved.
A man may forget all about how to make love during ten years of matrimony, but it's wonderful how quickly he can brush up on the fine points again after he becomes a widower.
FOURTH INTERLUDE
A MAN always looks at a woman through either the right or the wrong end of a telescope, and thus always sees her as a divinity or a devil – never as a human being.
Business girl's motto: "Better marry and be a poor man's slave than stay single and be a rich man's stenographer."
When a clever girl lets fly the arrows of wit she should be careful to see that a man's vanity is not the bull's eye.
It is difficult for a man to reconcile a girl's absorbing interest in picture-hats, pearl powder, and Paquin models with real brains; but somehow his own enthusiasm for baseball and golf never seems to him incompatible with superior intelligence.
Don't fancy your husband has ceased to love you merely because he no longer seems to notice your presence around the house; wait until he gets so that he doesn't even notice your absence.
A good husband is one who will get up and lift the ice off the dumbwaiter instead of lying back and lifting his voice to tell you how to do it without "hurting your itsy bitsy fingers."
The shallower a man's love, the more it bubbles over into eloquence. When his emotions go deep, words stick in his throat, and have to be hauled out of him with a derrick.
To be happy with a man you must understand him a lot and love him a little; to be happy with a woman you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all.
A man with savoir faire may scintillate in a crowd, but it takes a "bashful man" to shine in a dim cozy corner.
Every bride fancies that she married the original "cave-man" until she tries to persuade him to go out and argue with the furniture-movers.
What a man calls his conscience in a love affair is merely a pain in his vanity, the moral ache that accompanies a headache, or the mental action that follows a sentimental reaction.
It never pays to compromise! Cheap clothes, cheap literature, cheap sports, cheap flirtations – a life filled with these is nothing but an electric flash, advertising "something just as good."
Just at first, every man seems to fancy that it takes nothing but brute force and determination to run an automobile or a wife; after the smash-up he changes his mind.
Brains and beauty are an impossible combination in a woman – not necessarily impossible to find, but impossible to live with.
When a woman looks at a man in evening dress, she sometimes can't help wondering why he wants to blazon his ancestry to the world by wearing a coat with a long tail to it.
When a man says he loves you don't ask him "Why," because by the time he has found his reason he will undoubtedly have lost his enthusiasm.
Pshaw! It is no more reasonable to expect a man to love you tomorrow because he loves you today, than it is to assume that the sun will be shining tomorrow because the weather is pleasant today.
Sending a man a sentimental note, just after he has spent the evening with you, has about the same thrilling effect as offering him a sandwich, immediately after dinner.
A "good woman," according to Mrs. Grundy, is one who would scorn to sacrifice society for the sake of a man but will cheerfully sacrifice the man she marries for the sake of society.
The flower of a man's love is not an immortelle, but a morning-glory; which fades the moment the sun of a woman's smiles becomes too intense and glowing.
The sweetest part of a love affair is just before the confession when you begin discussing love in the abstract and gazing concretely into one another's eyes.
Marriage is a photogravure made from the glowing illusions which Love has painted on the canvas of the heart.
A woman may have to reach heaven before she tastes supernal joy; but to taste supreme punishment she has only to watch the love-mist die out of a man's eyes.
Nothing frightens a man like a woman's stony silence. Somehow in spite of his lack of intuition, he has a subconscious premonition that her love is dead when she is too weary and disinterested to "answer back."
The satisfaction in flattering a man consists in the fact that, whether you lay it on thick or thin, rough or smooth, a little of it is always bound to stick.
Love is a furnace in which the man builds the fire, and forever afterward expects the woman to keep it glowing, by supplying all the fuel.
The gods must love summer flirtations – they die so young.
A man may have heart enough to love more than one woman at a time, but unless he is a fatalist he should have brains enough not to try it.
When love dies a wise married couple give its ashes a respectful burial, and hang a good photograph of it on the wall for the benefit of the public.
