of holding a girl after you think you have her. There is a good deal
of money in store for the man that makes it--when he does. But she
seemed--. There now, I know all about it; but you musn't hold a girl
rigidly to what you think she seems. When you get to be as old as I
am, you will know that girls have a hard, hard time of it. Custom won't
allow them to do anything but seem. It doesn't allow them to tell a
man that they like him, and, still worse, it doesn't allow them to
tell him that they don't like him. You did go there, you know, pretty
nearly all last year, didn't you? What could she do? Set the dogs on
you? That would have been unmistakable, but in her set that isn't
allowable. Be rude to you? She is a lady, how could she be rude? She
shouldn't have accepted--. There now, be fair about this thing. How
could she help accepting your attentions, your bonbons, your sleigh
rides, your--well, your boring generally, if you will have it--without
being rude? There isn't, under our social rules, a more defenceless
creature on earth than an attractive girl in society, from attentions
that are wearisome and unwelcome. Nor, if she maintains the
self-respecting rules that society has laid down for her, is there a
more helpless creature in obtaining what she wants. You often hear it
flippantly said, that if a girl loves a man she can always let him
know it. There never was a greater mistake. On the contrary, the poor
young things, when they find it out, so far from being able to let the
young fellow know it, commence a fearful struggle to keep him from
knowing it. I suppose it is, so to speak, constitutional with them,
and they can't help it. I have seen a gentle, well-bred young girl in
such agonized fear of discovery that she rudely repulsed the common
advances of politeness on the part of the object. Women lose their
heads on the subject of love, as often, I sometimes think, as their
hearts.