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Hints for Lovers by Arnold Haultain
page 11 of 191 (05%)
law; for she knows instinctively that an easy victory prognosticates a
fickle victor. Is she abundantly endowed with the very attributes that
make for wife-and mother-hood, a strong and swaying passion and an
affection unbounded, she must hold them in leash with exemplary patience;
for, alas! Are they given the rein for a single passing moment, instead
of being accounted unto her for righteousness, they work her ruin. She
must win her one man, and she must win him for life; but she cannot pick
or choose, for she must wait to be asked.

If she make test of many admirers, she is described as a flirt; if,
conscientious and demure, she await her fate, a desirable fate is by no
means assured.

In truth it seems that too often a girl must dissemble--hateful as
dissemblance in men. T'is a hard road indeed that a girl has to travel.
To win her a fellow-farer for life, she must go out of her way to
accommodate so many travelers: and this one is lured by this, and that
one by that, and another by something unnoticed by the throng. But, an
she dissembles one iota too much, her fellow-farers look askance, and he
who eventually joins her for good upbraids her for that by which she won.


Dissemblance is indeed at once the boon and the bane of a girl: without
it, she thinks to be overlooked (often enough a preposterous assumption);
with it, she is looked upon too much. And always,

Always a girl has to pretend that never did she descend to dissemblance.
--Which, nevertheless, is sometimes absolutely true, for

Just now and then there happens that miracle of miracles, where their
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