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Title: The Widow [To Say Nothing of the Man]

Author: Helen Rowland

Release date: April 27, 2010 [eBook #32152]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Emmy, Tor Martin Kristiansen and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
        file was produced from images generously made available
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WIDOW [TO SAY NOTHING OF THE MAN] ***




Produced by Emmy, Tor Martin Kristiansen and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)











THE WIDOW

[Illustration: "OH well, I was only showing you the sugar bowl."
_Frontispiece_]





THE WIDOW

[TO SAY NOTHING OF THE MAN]

BY HELEN ROWLAND

ILLUSTRATED BY ESTHER P. HILL

[Illustration]

          DODGE PUBLISHING COMPANY
          220 EAST 23D STREET, NEW YORK




          Copyright, 1908, by Dodge Publishing Co.

          [THE WIDOW. 3]




CONTENTS


                                             PAGE

           I THE WIDOW                          5

          II THE WINNING CARD?                 18

         III WHY?                              32

          IV THE WIDOW'S RIVAL                 47

           V MONEY AND MATRIMONY               60

          VI SIGNS AND COUNTERSIGNS OF LOVE    73

         VII A SHORT CUT                       86

        VIII AFTER LOVE--(?)                  101

          IX HER WAY                          118

           X MARRIAGE                         135

          XI THE WIDOW'S DEAL                 151

         XII NEW YEAR'S IRRESOLUTIONS         165




I

THE WIDOW.


"WHAT would you say," asked the widow, tucking her skirts cautiously
about her patent leather toes and leaning back luxuriously against the
variegated pillows, "if I should tell you that I have found the very
girl who would make you a model wife?"

The bachelor glanced up indifferently and dipped the paddle lazily into
the water.

"What model?" he asked, suspiciously. "Women are like automobiles, you
know. There are so many models. And even after you have selected one
most carefully you never can tell what it is going to do."

"They are more like horses," declared the widow, "if you know how to
handle them, and are gentle and kind----"

"And let them see you're master----"

"And don't jab them with spiteful little spurs----"

"And know when to pull on the curb----"

"And when to coax them with sugar----"

"And when to beat 'em--and even then you can't tell what they're going
to shy at or balk at any more than you can tell when an automobile is
going to break down or run away or blow up. But this 'model'--is she
pretty and fetching and warranted to run smoothly over rough roads and
to climb all the matrimonial hills and not puncture a tire in the
finances and to be just as good for a long run as for a spurt? Is she
smart looking and substantial and----"

The widow sat up so quickly that the canoe swayed unsteadily beneath
them.

"She's not a harem, Mr. Travers!" she cried. "Oh, dear!" she sighed
hopelessly, leaning back again, "why is it that every man expects to get
a harem of virtues combined in one wife? I don't believe any man but
Solomon was ever perfectly satisfied with domestic life."

"Solomon," remarked the bachelor, giving the paddle an emphatic shove,
"understood the necessity for variety in wives. But if Solomon had lived
in the twentieth century he wouldn't have needed so many--er--annexations.
He would have got it all in one modern woman.
Now, you, for instance----"

"Speaking impersonally," interrupted the widow, trying to look austere
and at the same time to blow a chiffon veil out of her mouth, "when a
man buys an automobile he selects a runabout or a victoria or a touring
car or a racing machine, according to his needs, and is satisfied."

"Not at all," protested the bachelor. "The moment he has one automobile
he is sighing for another, and he is never happy until he has a garage
full----"

"And it is the same about a coat or a hat," persisted the widow,
ignoring the interruption; "he picks out what suits him best; but he
doesn't expect his top hat to do him for picnics nor his swallow-tail
to serve for lawn tennis nor his yachting cap to look well in church
nor----"

"A derby," interrupted the bachelor, "will do almost anywhere."

"They're hideous, Mr. Travers! and stiff and commonplace and
uncomfortable and----"

"Are they anything like the model wife you've picked out for me?"
inquired the bachelor insinuatingly.

The widow flushed under the corner of her chiffon veil.

"Well," she acquiesced unwillingly, "she isn't particularly pretty nor
brilliant and fascinating, and all that; but she's just the kind of a
girl a man ought to marry."

"And never does!" finished the bachelor triumphantly, backing water and
turning the canoe for mid-stream. "Of all kinds of women a man
detests----"

"How many kinds of women are there?" cried the widow suddenly.

"How many women are there?" retorted the bachelor. "The variety is only
limited by the number of feminine individuals. But fundamentally they
can be divided into two classes, just as automobiles can be divided into
gasoline and electric. There is the woman a man wants to marry, the kind
that is stamped from birth for wifehood, the even-tempered,
steady-going, comfortable kind of girl that you would like to tie to for
life and with whom you know you would be perfectly contented--and
utterly stupid. Every man has in mind his ideal wife; and nearly every
man's ideal is of the calm, domestic, wholly good, wholly sweet sort,
the sort that seems like a harbor away from the storm. But so often,
just about as he has found this ideal, or before he has found her and
before the sun of his summer day dream has risen the storm comes
along----"

"The--what?"

"The tumultuous, impossible, adorable, unfathomable woman--the woman who
may be good or bad, ugly or beautiful, but is always fascinating,
alluring and irresistible. And she wrecks his little summer day dream
and turns his snug harbor into a roaring whirlpool and carries him off
in a tempest. Sometimes he marries her and sometimes he doesn't; but
whether he does or does not, he is always spoiled for the other kind
afterward."

"And if he does marry her," added the widow, trailing her fingers
thoughtfully in the water, "he is always sorry and wishing he had
married the other kind."

"Well," the bachelor laid his paddle across his knee, "what's the
difference? If he had married the other kind he would always have been
wishing he hadn't. Now if a man could only be allowed two wives----"

"One for week days and one for--holidays?" inquired the widow
sarcastically.

"Yes," acquiesced the bachelor, "one for each side of him, the tame side
and the untamed side. One to serve as a harbor and make him a home and
fulfill his domestic longings and bring up his children and keep him
sane and moral; and the other to amuse him and entertain him and inspire
him and put the trimmings on life and the spice and flavor in the
matrimonial dish."

"A sedative and a stimulant!" jeered the widow. "One to stir you up and
one to calm you down; one to spur you forward and one to pull on the
curb--a Hebe and a Minerva! And then you'd be running around demanding a
Venus to make you forget the other two. Whatever woman a man marries, he
invariably spends his life sighing for something different. If he is
tied to a nice, soft sofa pillow, he longs for a backbone. If he marries
a parlor ornament, he yearns for a kitchen utensil. If his wife has a
Greek nose, he discovers afterward that what he really admires is pugs.
If he picks out red hair or black, he will go blocks out of his way to
pursue every yellow glint that catches his eye. And if he married a
whole harem at once he would discover that what he really wanted was
monogamy, and a single wife with a single idea. There aren't enough
kinds of women in the world to fulfill any one man's idea of what a wife
should be."

"And yet," sighed the bachelor, "I once knew a woman who would have done
that--all by herself."

The widow looked unconvinced.

"Was she a model wife?" she inquired, skeptically.

"How do I know?" said the bachelor. "She wasn't my wife."

"Of course not!" cried the widow. "It is always the other man's wife who
is our ideal----"

"She wasn't my ideal," protested the bachelor. "She was the storm that
shattered my ideal and spoiled me for matrimony. She was a whole garage,
a whole stable, a whole harem in one."

The widow looked distinctly disapproving.

"It's lucky," she said coldly, "that you escaped--a woman like--that!"

"But I haven't," protested the bachelor, laying down his paddle and
leaning forward so that the ends of the widow's chiffon veil blew in his
face. "She was the spice in life's pudding, the flavor, the sauce, the
stimulant, the----"

"This canoe is tipping dreadfully," remarked the widow, but the
disapproval had disappeared from her eyes.

"She was----"

"Why, I do believe it's growing dark, Mr. Travers."

"It is," agreed the bachelor. "Nobody can see----"

"See--what?" asked the widow, suddenly sitting up straight and fixing
the bachelor with her eyes.

"How perfectly adorable and unfathomable and tumultuous----"

"Are you feeding me sugar, Mr. Travers?"

"Perhaps," acknowledged the bachelor, leaning back and picking up the
paddle again, "but some day, when I'm ready, I'm going to stop feeding
you sugar. I'm going to put on the curb bit."

"Why don't you do it now--Billy?" asked the widow, with a challenging
glance from beneath her lashes.

"I can't," grumbled the bachelor, "while you are blowing that chiffon
veil."

The widow took the two ends of the offensive thing and tied them
deliberately under her chin.

"Some day," continued the bachelor, as he swung the canoe shoreward with
a vigorous dip of the paddle, "I'm going to show you who's master. I'm
going to marry you and then--"

"Be sorry!" laughed the widow.

"Of course," assented the bachelor, "but I'd be sorrier--if I didn't."




II

THE WINNING CARD?


"THERE," said the bachelor as he bowed to a little man across the room,
"sits the eighth wonder of the world--a man with a squint and a cork leg
and no income to speak of, who has just married for the third time. What
makes us so fascinating?"

The widow laid down her oyster fork and gazed thoughtfully at the
beautiful girl in blue chiffon sitting opposite the man with the squint.

"Don't generalize," she said, turning rebukingly to the bachelor. "You
mean what makes the little man so fascinating?"

The bachelor jabbed an oyster viciously.

"Well," he grumbled, "what does make him so fascinating? Is it the
squint or the cork----"

The widow looked at him reproachfully.

"Don't be envious," she said. "He might have two squints and yet be
successful with women. Haven't you ever seen a runty, plain little man
before, with nothing on earth, apparently, to recommend him except his
sex, who could draw the women as a magnet does needles?"

The bachelor dropped his oyster and stared at the widow.

"It's hypnotism!" he declared with solemn conviction.

The widow laughed.

"It's nothing of the sort," she contradicted. "It's because he holds
man's winning card and knows how to play it. Just observe the tender
solicitude with which he consults her about that fish."

"You mean," inquired the bachelor suspiciously, "that he has a
fascinating way?"

"That's all he needs," responded the widow promptly, "to make him
irresistible."

"Then, how do you account," argued the bachelor, indicating a
Gibsonesque young man eating his dinner alone under a palm at the corner
table, "for the popularity of that Greek god over there? He's a perfect
boor, yet the women in this hotel pet him and coax him and cuddle him as
if he were a prize lion cub."

"Oh," remarked the widow, "if you were all Greek gods--that would be
different. But, unfortunately, the average man is just an ungainly
looking thing in a derby hat and hideous clothes, with knuckly hands and
padded shoulders and a rough chin."

"Thank you," said the bachelor sweetly. "I see--as in a looking glass.
Evidently our countenances--"

"Pooh!" jeered the widow, "your countenances just don't count. That's
all. What profiteth it a man though he have the face of an Apollo if he
have the legs of a Caliban? A woman never bothers about a man's face.
It's his figure that attracts her. She will forgive weak eyes and a
cut-off chin twice as quickly as weak shoulders and cut-off legs."

"That's why we pad them--the shoulders," explained the bachelor.

"You wouldn't need to," retorted the widow, "if you knew how to play the
winning card."

"What IS the winning card?" implored the bachelor, leaning across the
table anxiously.

The widow laid down her soup spoon and bent to arrange the violets in
her belt meditatively.

"Well," she said, "Sir Walter Raleigh played it and it won him a title;
and Mr. Mantellini played it and it kept him in spending money and fancy
waistcoats for years without his doing a stroke of work; and Louis
XIV.--but oh, pshaw! You know all about that. Briefly speaking, a man's
winning card is his knowledge of how to treat a woman. Specifically, it
is a tender, solicitous, protecting manner. A woman just loves to be
'protected,' whether there is anything to be protected from or not. She
loves to know that you are anxious for her safety and comfort, even when
there is no cause in the world for your anxiety. She loves to have you
wait on her, even when there is a room full of hired waiters about. She
loves to be treated like an adorable, cunning, helpless child, even when
she is five feet ten and weighs a cool two hundred. She delights in
having a mental cloak laid down for her to walk over and every time you
do it she secretly knights you."

"It sounds awfully easy," said the bachelor.

"But it isn't," retorted the widow, "if it were all men would try
it--and all men would be perfectly irresistible."

"Well, aren't they?" asked the bachelor, innocently. "I thought
they----"

"The winning way, the irresistible masculine manner," pursued the widow,
ignoring the interruption, "is something subtle and inborn. It can't be
put on or varnished over. It is neither a pose nor a patent. It is the
gift of one of the good fairies at birth. If it is going to be trained
into a man he must be caught and schooled very early--say, before he is
ten years old. It's his ingrain attitude toward women and he begins by
practicing it on his mother. If he is not to the manner born and tries
to cultivate it late in life, he must watch very carefully to see that
he does not overdo it like a lackey or a dancing master or the villain
in a melodrama. Of course, it can be cultivated to a certain extent,
like music or Christian Science, but it's hard for a man to learn that a
woman is a fragile creature and needs a bodyguard, after he has been
twenty years letting his sisters pack their own trunks and lug their own
satchels and golf clubs. Besides, most men are too busy or too
self-absorbed to cultivate it, if they could."

"Most men," remarked the bachelor, stirring his coffee and lighting his
cigarette, "aren't anxious to become the sort of 'mother's darling' you
describe."

"Nonsense," retorted the widow. "Richard the Third was a perfectly
adorable ladies' man and he couldn't be called exactly--a 'mother's
darling.' Yet the things he said to poor Lady Anne and the way he said
them would have turned any feminine brain. It isn't milk and water that
women admire; it's the milk of human interest. It's the feeling that a
man is gazing at you instead of through you at his own reflection--or
some other woman."

"But if it means giving up all the easy chairs," protested the bachelor,
"and packing all the family trunks and putting out your pipe every time
a female member of the family approaches and eating dishes you don't
want and running round doing household errands, a man hasn't got
time----"

"It doesn't!" declared the widow. "It has nothing to do with morals or
with selfishness. Some of the most selfish men in the world are those
whom a poor little woman will work her fingers to the bone to support,
simply because when she comes home at night after her labors her husband
puts his arms around her and tells her how sad it makes him feel to see
her struggle so, and how young and beautiful she keeps in spite of it
all and orders her to lie down and let him run out and fetch her some
ice cream and read to her. A man with that sort of way with him can get
anything on earth out of a woman and then make her eternally grateful to
him. Look at the husbands who slave all day earning money for their
wives to spend and go home tired out and grouchy and never get a word of
thanks. Yet, a man can stay out six nights in the week, and if he will
come home on the seventh with a kiss and a compliment and a box of candy
and any old lie and a speech about sympathy and all that, a nice
sensible wife will forgive and forget--and adore him."

[Illustration: "THAT Greek god has been staring as if he contemplated
murder." _Page 28_]

"But are there any nice sensible wives?" asked the bachelor plaintively.

"Have you finished your cigarette, Mr. Travers?" inquired the widow
coolly.

"Because if there are, that is just what I am looking----"

"If you have," pursued the widow, "I think we had better go."

The bachelor rose with alacrity. "I think so, too," he acquiesced,
pleasantly. "That Greek god over yonder under the palm has been
staring at me as if he contemplated murder for the last half hour."

The widow blushed.

"Perhaps," she said with a one-cornered smile, "he is envying you----"

"Undoubtedly!" agreed the bachelor.

"Envying you," pursued the widow, "your fascinating ways."

"Oh," cried the bachelor, "then I have got it."

"What?" said the widow.

"The winning card. The charm!"

"Well," said the widow, putting her head on the side and gazing at him
speculatively, "you wear a derby hat."

"I take it off in the house and in the presence of ladies," protested
the bachelor.

"And your shoulders----" began the widow.

"They are my own!" declared the bachelor.

"And your----"

"They also are mine," broke in the bachelor quickly.

"And besides all that," added the widow, "you have that little bald spot
in the middle of your head. And yet----"

"Go on," said the bachelor, "you have said the worst."

"I broke an engagement with a nice boy to dine with you to-night."

"That doesn't prove anything," said the bachelor scornfully. "Maybe he
hasn't played the winning card."

"No, it proves you have," declared the widow.

"I can't see it!" protested the bachelor.

"Well, just look at the Greek god over under the palm and then look in
the glass at yourself and--work it out."

"But why look at the Greek god?"

"Because," said the widow, turning to the mirror and carefully tilting
her hat, "he is the nice boy with whom I broke the engagement."




III

WHY?


"WHY is a woman?" snapped the bachelor, flinging himself into the big
armchair opposite the widow with a challenging glance.

"Why--why, because," stammered the widow; startled at his sudden
appearance.

"I knew it!" said the bachelor with conviction.

"And there are lots of other reasons, Mr. Travers."

"But they aren't reasonable," declared the bachelor doggedly.

The widow closed her book with a sigh and laid it on the table beside
her.

"Who said they were?" she asked witheringly. "Neither is a woman. Being
reasonable is so stupid. It's worse than being suitable or sensible,
or--or proper."

The bachelor lifted his eyebrows in mild astonishment.

"I thought those were virtues," he protested.

"They are, Mr. Travers," returned the widow crushingly, "and that's why
they're so uninteresting. You might as well ask why is music, or
painting, or pâté de foie gras, or champagne, or ice cream, or anything
else charming and delicious--"

"And utterly useless."

"Of course," agreed the widow, leaning back and thoughtfully twisting
the bit of lace she called a handkerchief. "It's the utterly useless
things that make the world attractive and pleasant to live in--like
flowers and bonbons and politics and love--"

"And tobacco," added the bachelor reflectively.

"Woman is the dessert to the feast," went on the widow, "the trimmings
on the garment of life, the spice in the pudding. Of course, a man can
eat his dinner without dessert or champagne and live his life without
kisses or a woman--but somehow he never does."

"And that's just where he gets into trouble," retorted the bachelor
promptly. "If you could only tell," he went on pathetically, "what any
one of them was going to do or why she was going to do it, or----"

"Then it isn't 'Why _is_ a woman?' but 'Why _does_ a woman?' that you
wanted to know," interrupted the widow helpfully.

"That's it!" cried the bachelor, "why does she get off a car backward?
Why does she wear a skirt four yards long and then get furious if you
step on it? Why does she make a solemn and important engagement without
the slightest intention of keeping it? Why does she put on open-work
stockings and gaudy shoes and hold her frock as high as she dares--and
then annihilate you if you stare at her? Why does she use everything as
it was not intended to be used--a hairpin to pick a lock, a buttonhook
to open a can, a hairbrush to hammer a nail, a hatpin to rob a letter
box, a razor to sharpen a pencil and a cup and saucer to decorate the
mantelpiece? Why does she gush over the woman she hates worst and snub
the man she is dying to marry? Why does she lick all the glue off a
postage stamp and then try to make it stick? Why does she cry at a
wedding and act frivolous at a funeral? Why does she put a new feather
on her hat and a new kink in her hair, and expect a man to notice it as
quickly and be as astonished as he would if she had shaved her head or
lost a limb? Why does she seem offended if you don't make love to her,
and then get angry if you do? Why does she act kittenish when she's big
and dignified, when she's little and old, when she's young and silly,
when she's old? And why, oh, why, did you inveigle me into coming down
to this miserable pink-and-white house party with the hope of being
near you and then utterly ignore me and spend your time flirting with
Bobby Taylor, while I sulk about like a lost sheep or run errands----"

"For Miss Manners?" suggested the widow cuttingly.

"Miss Manners!" exclaimed the bachelor scornfully.

"You once thought her very beautiful, Mr. Travers."

"That's just it!" retorted the bachelor. "Why didn't you let me go on
thinking her beautiful----"

"'As delicate as a sea shell,' wasn't it?"

"Yes," snapped the bachelor, "and as--hollow!"

The widow smiled enigmatically.

"Tell me," she said sympathetically, "what she has done to you."

"Well, for one thing," complained the bachelor, "she coaxed me out on
the piazza last night in the moonlight, and then, when she had talked
sentiment for half an hour and lured me to a dark spot and simply goaded
me into taking her hand----"

The widow sat up straight.

"But you didn't do it, Billy Travers!"

"Of course I did. It seemed almost an insult not to. And what did she
do? She jerked it away, flung herself from me, rose like an outraged
queen, turned on me with that 'I-thought-you-were-a-gentleman' air and
said----"

The widow lay back in her chair and laughed.

"Oh, mercy!" she said, wiping the tears from her eyes when she was
able. "Excuse me but--but--how did she look when she did it?"

"Well," confessed the bachelor, "she did look rather stunning."

"That's why she did it," explained the widow between laughs. "A woman's
reason for doing most things is because she thinks she will look well
doing them."

"Or because she thinks you will look surprised if she does them."

"Or because she wants to attract your attention."

"Or to make you feel uncomfortable."

"Or to astonish you or amuse you or----"

"Work on your sensibilities, or get on your nerves, or play on your
sympathies. But," he went on growing wroth at the recollection, "the
idea of a little chit like that--and that isn't the worst. This morning
she dragged me out of bed at half-past five to go fishing. Fishing! At
this season! I never saw a girl so crazy for fish in my life; and when
we had walked four miles to find the right spot and she had been silent
long enough for me to feel a nibble at the bait and had helped me with
all her might and main to haul in that blessed little fish, do you know
what she did?"

The widow looked up questioningly.

"She cried because I wanted to bring it home and made me throw it back
into the water. That's what she did!"

The widow sat up straight, with horrified eyes.

"Well, of course she did!" she exclaimed heatedly. "She only asked you
to _catch_ the fish didn't she--not to _kill_ it?"

The bachelor stared at her for a moment without speaking. Then he got up
silently and walked over to the window.

"I suppose," he remarked after a long pause, apparently addressing the
front lawn or the blue heavens, "that it's that same sort of logic that
incites a woman to play for a man until she catches him--and then throw
him overboard. O Lord," he continued, glancing at the sky devoutly, "why
couldn't you have made them nice and sensible?"

The widow took up her book with disdain.

"'Nice and sensible'" she repeated witheringly. "Just think how it
would feel to be called 'nice and sensible!' I wish," she added, turning
to her novel with an air of boredom, "that you would go and--talk to
Ethel Manners."

The bachelor eyed her narrowly.

"I guess I will," he said finally. "She seems more interesting--now that
you've explained her."

The widow stopped in the middle of a paragraph and looked up.

"And by Jove!" went on the bachelor reminiscently, turning to the window
again, "she did look dreamy in a sunbonnet and that little short skirt
this morning. She has adorable feet, you know."

The widow closed her book with a sharp snap, keeping her fingers between
the pages.

"_I_ know, Mr. Travers; but how did _you_ know?"

"I looked at them," confessed the bachelor frankly, "and her ankles--"

The widow's mouth closed in a straight line.

"I'm afraid, Mr. Travers," she remarked frigidly, "that you are not a
fit companion for a young girl like Ethel."

"I'm not equal to her," grinned the bachelor.

"No, you're not. She's a nice, sensible girl and----"

"Do you hate her very much?"

"Hate her?" The widow's eyes opened with astonishment.

"You called her 'nice and sensible.'"

"Bobby Taylor's looking for you, Marion," called Miss Manners, glancing
in at the door suddenly.

"Well, goodby. I'm off," said the bachelor, following the swish of Miss
Manners's skirts with his eyes, as she hurried away down the hall.

"Sit down, Mr. Travers!" commanded the widow in an awful tone.

At that moment a buoyant young man poked his head in at the door.

"Go way, Bobby," said the widow. "Mr. Travers and I are
discussing--er--psychology."

"Ugh!" remarked Bobby, dutifully withdrawing, "why do you do it, if it
hurts?"

The bachelor looked up at the widow under the tail of his eyelid.

"Does it hurt?" he asked.

But the widow's underlip was curled into a distinct pout and her eyes
met his reproachfully. She dabbed them effectively with the end of her
lace handkerchief.

"Of c-course it does," she said with a little choke in her voice, "when
you have been here three whole days and have never noticed me and have
spent every minute of your time trailing around after
that--that--little--"

"But wasn't that what you invited me for?" exclaimed the bachelor
helplessly.

"Of course it was," acknowledged the widow, "but--but I didn't think
you'd do it."

The bachelor gazed at her a moment in blank amazement. Then a gleam of
enlightenment came into his eyes and he leaned over and caught her
fingers.

"Look here, Marion," he said gently, "you invited me down here to fling
that girl at my head. If you didn't want me to fall in love with her,
what did you want?"

"I wanted you to get enough of her!" explained the widow, smiling
through her lace handkerchief.

"Well--I have. I've got too much!" vowed the bachelor fervently.

The widow laughed softly and complacently.

"That's just what I knew would happen," she said, closing her novel and
flinging it onto the couch.

Then she added, looking up quizzically:

"A woman always has a reason--if you can only find out what it is."




IV

THE WIDOW'S RIVAL.


"WHY," said the widow, gazing thoughtfully at the ruby-faced woman with
the gigantic waist-line, who sat beside the meek little man on the bench
opposite, "do men marry--those?"

The bachelor glanced into the violet eyes beneath the violet hat.

"Perhaps," he said insinuatingly, "because they can't get--somebody
else."

"Nonsense," replied the widow poking her parasol emphatically into the
sand. "With all the chance a man has----"

"Chance!" cried the bachelor scoffingly. "Chance! What chance has a man
got after a woman makes up her mind to marry him?"

The widow dug the sand spitefully with the point of her violet sunshade.

"I didn't refer to the chance of escape," she replied, icily. "I was
speaking of the chance of a choice."

"That's it!" cried the bachelor. "The selection is so great--the choice
is so varied! Don't you know how it is when you have too many dress
patterns or hats or rings to choose from? You find it difficult to
settle on any one--so difficult, in fact, that you decide not to choose
at all, but to keep them all dangling----"

"Or else just shut your eyes," interrupted the widow, "and put out your
hand and grab something."

[Illustration: "CHANCE! what chance has a man got?" _Page 48_]

"Of course, you shut your eyes!" acquiesced the bachelor. "Whoever
went into matrimony with his eyes open?"

"A woman does," declared the widow tentatively. "She knows exactly what
she wants, and if it is possible, she gets it. It is only after she has
tried and failed many times that she puts her hand into the matrimonial
grab-bag, and accepts anything she happens to pull out. But a man never
employs any reason at all in picking out a wife----"

"Naturally!" scoffed the bachelor. "By that time, he's lost his reason!"

The widow rested her elbow on the handle of her sunshade, put her chin
in her hand and smiled out at the sea.

"Yes," she said, "he has. He has reached the marrying mood."

"The--what?"

"The marrying mood. A man never decides to marry a girl just simply
because he loves her, or because she is suitable, or because he ought to
marry her, or because she is irresistible or fascinating or in love with
him. He never marries at all until he gets the marrying mood, the
matrimonial fever--and then he marries the first girl who comes along
and wants him, young or old, pretty or ugly, good or bad. And that
explains why a lot of men are tied up to women that you cannot possibly
see any reason for having been married at all, much less married to
those particular men."

"Good heavens!" exclaimed the bachelor, "I'm glad I've got past the
age----"

"But you haven't!" declared the widow emphatically. "The marrying fever
is, like the measles or the appendicitis, liable to catch you at any age
or stage, and you never know when or why or how you got it. Sometimes a
man takes it when he is very young and rushes into a fool marriage with
a woman twice his age, and sometimes he goes all his life up to sixty
without catching the contagion and then gets it horribly and marries his
cook or a chorus girl young enough to be his granddaughter. Haven't you
seen confirmed bachelors successfully resist the wiles of the most
fascinating women and turn down a dozen suitable girls--and then, just
when you thought they were quite safe and entirely past the chance of
marriage as well as their first youth, turn around and tie themselves
to some little fool thing without a penny to her name or a thought worth
half that amount? That was a late attack of the matrimonial fever--and
the older you get it the harder it goes. Let me see," added the widow
thoughtfully, "how old are you?"

"I haven't lost my ideals--nor my teeth!" declared the bachelor
defensively.

"What is your ideal?" asked the widow leaning over and peeping up under
the bachelor's hat brim.

The bachelor stared back at her through lowered lashes.

"It's got on a violet hat," he began, "and violet----"

"Is that a ship out there?" asked the widow, suddenly becoming
interested in the sea.

"And violet----"

"Oh, dear!" she interrupted petulantly. "Of course, you've got ideals.
All men have ideals--but they don't often marry them. The trouble is
that when a man has the marrying fever he can clothe anything in curls
and petticoats with the illusions he has built around that ideal, and
put the ideal's halo on her head and imagine she is the real thing. He
can look at a red-headed, pug-nosed girl from an angle that will make
her hair seem pure gold and her pug look Greek. By some mental feat, he
can transform a girl six feet tall with no waist line and an acute elbow
into a kittenish, plump little thing that he has always had in mind--and
marry her. Or, if his ideal is tall and willowy and ethereal, and he
happens to meet a woman weighing 200 pounds whose first thought in the
morning is her breakfast and whole last thought at night is her dinner,
he will picture her merely attractively plump and a marvel of intellect
and imagination. And," the widow sank her chin in her hand and gazed out
to sea reflectively, "it is all so pitiful, when you think how happy men
could make marriage, if they would only go about it scientifically!"

"Then what," inquired the bachelor flinging away his cigar and folding
his arms dramatically, "is the science of choosing a wife?"

"Well," said the widow, counting off on the tips of her lilac silk
gloves, "first of all a man should never choose a wife when he finds
himself feeling lonesome and dreaming of furnished flats and stopping
to talk to babies in the street. He has the marrying fever then, and is
in no fit condition to pick out a wife and unless he is very careful he
is liable to marry the first girl who smiles at him. He should shut his
eyes tight and flee to the wilderness and not come back until he is
prepared to see women in their proper lights and their right
proportions."

"And then?" suggested the bachelor.

"Then," announced the widow oratorically, "he should choose a wife as he
would a dish at the table--not because he finds her attractive or
delicious or spicy, but--because he thinks she will agree with him."

"I see," added the bachelor, "and won't keep him awake nights," he
added.

The widow nodded.

"Nor give him a bitter taste in the mouth in the morning. A good wife is
like a dose of medicine--hard to swallow, but truly helpful. The girls
who wear frills and high heels and curly pompadours are like the salad
with the most dressing and garnishing, likely to be too rich and spicy,
while the plain little thing in the serge skirt, who never powders her
nose, may prove as sweet and wholesome--as--as home-made pudding."

"Or--home-made pickles," suggested the bachelor with wry face.

The widow shook her parasol at him admonishingly.

"Don't do that!" cried the bachelor.

"Do what?" inquired the widow in astonishment.

"Wave your frills in my eyes! I had just made up my mind to propose to
Miss Gunning and----"

The widow sat up perfectly straight.

"Do you really admire--a marble slab, Mr. Travers?"

"And your frills," pursued the bachelor, unmoved, "like salad
dressing----"

"I beg your pardon."

"Or garnishings----"

"Mr. Travers!"

"Might be merely a lure to make me take something which would disagree
with me."

The widow rose and looked coolly out over the waves.

"I can't see," she said, "why you should fancy there could be any
chance----"

"I don't," sighed the bachelor. "It isn't a matter of chance, but of
choice."

The ice in the widow's eyes melted into sun in a moment. She turned to
the bachelor impulsively.

"Why do you want to marry me?" she asked.

The bachelor rose and looked down at her critically.

"Well," he said, "for one thing, because you're just the woman I ought
not to marry."

"What!"

"You're too highly spiced----"

"Billy!"

"And you'd be sure not to agree with me----"

"Billy Travers!"

"And because----"

"Well? Go on."

"Because----" The bachelor hesitated and gazed deep into the violet
eyes.

"Please proceed, Mr. Travers."

"I won't!" The bachelor turned his back on her defiantly.

The widow came a little nearer and stooped around to peep under his
hat-brim.

"Please--Billy!" she breathed softly.

"Well, then--because I'm in the marrying mood," he replied.

But the widow was half way to the hotel before he knew what had
happened.




V

MONEY AND MATRIMONY.


"WHAT rhymes with 'matrimony'?" inquired the widow, taking her pencil
out of her mouth and looking up thoughtfully through the fringes of her
pompadour.

"Money," responded the bachelor promptly, as he flung himself down on
the grass beside her and proceeded to study her profile through the
shadows of the maple leaves.

The widow tilted her chin scornfully.

"I suppose they do sound alike," she condescended, "but I am making a
poem; and there is no poetical harmony in the combination."

"There is no harmony at all without it," remarked the bachelor shortly.
"But how on earth can you make a poem out of matrimony?"

"Some people do," replied the widow loftily.

"On paper!" sneered the bachelor. "On paper they make poems of death and
babies and railroad accidents and health foods. But in real life
matrimony isn't a poem; it's more like a declaration of war, or an
itemized expense account, or a census report, or a cold business
proposition."

The widow bit the end of her pencil and laid aside her paper. If the
bachelor could have caught a glimpse of her eyes beneath the lowered
lashes he might not have gone on; but he was studying the sky through
the maple leaves.

"It's a beautiful business proposition," he added. "A magnificent money
making scheme, a----"

The bachelor's eyes had dropped to the widow's and he stopped short.

"Go on," she remarked in a cold, sweet voice that trickled down his
back.

"Oh, well," he protested lamely, "when you marry for money you generally
get it, don't you? But when you marry for love--it's like putting your
last dollar on a long shot."

"If you mean there's a delightful uncertainty about it?" began the
widow.

"There's nothing half so delightful," declared the bachelor, "as betting
on a sure thing. Now, the man or woman who marries for money----"

"Earns it," broke in the widow fervently. "Earns it by the sweat of the
brow. The man who marries a woman for her money is a white slave, a bond
servant, a travesty on manhood. For every dollar he receives he gives a
full equivalent in self-respect and independence, and all the things
dearest to a real man."

"A real man," remarked the bachelor, taking out his pipe and lighting
it, "wouldn't marry a woman for her money. It's woman to whom marriage
presents the alluring financial prospect."

"Oh, I don't know," responded the widow, crossing her arms behind her
head and leaning thoughtfully against the tree at her back. "In these
days of typewriting and stenography and manicuring and trained nursing,
matrimony offers about the poorest returns, from a business standpoint,
of any feminine occupation--the longest hours, the hardest work, the
greatest drain on your patience, the most exacting master and the
smallest pay, to say nothing of no holidays and not even an evening
off."

"Nor a chance to 'give notice' if you don't like your job," added the
bachelor sympathetically.

"If the average business man," went on the widow, ignoring the
interruption, "demanded half of his stenographer that he demands of his
wife he couldn't keep her three hours."

"And yet," remarked the bachelor, pulling on his pipe meditatively, "the
average stenographer is only too glad to exchange her position for that
of wife whenever she gets----"

The jangle of gold bangles, as the widow brought her arms down from
behind her head and sat up straight, interrupted his speech.

"Whenever she gets----"

The widow picked up her ruffles and started to rise.

"Whenever she gets--ready," finished the bachelor quickly.

The widow sat down again and leaned back against the tree.

"How perfectly you illustrate my point," she remarked sweetly.

"Oh," said the bachelor, taking his pipe out of his mouth, "did you have
a point?"

"That marriage is something higher and finer than a business
proposition, Mr. Travers, and that there are lots of reasons for
marrying besides financial ones."

"Oh, yes," agreed the bachelor, "there is folly and feminine coercion
and because you can't get out of it, and----"

"As for marriage as a money affair," pursued the widow without waiting,
"it's just the money side of it that causes all the squabbles and
unhappiness. If they've got it, they are always quarreling over it and
if they haven't got it they are always quarreling for it. The
Castellanes and Marlboroughs who fight over their bills and their debts
aren't any happier than the Murphys and the Hooligans who fight over the
price of a pint of beer. It's just as difficult to know what to do with
money when you've got it as it is to know what to do without it when
you haven't got it; and a million dollars between husband and wife is a
bigger gulf than a $10 a week salary. It's not a question of the amount
of money, but the question of who shall spend it that makes all the
trouble."

"But don't you see," argued the bachelor, sitting up suddenly and
knocking the ashes out of his pipe, "that all that would be eliminated
if people would make marriage a business proposition? For instance, if
two people would discuss the situation rationally and make the terms
before marriage; if the man would state the services he requires and the
woman would demand the compensation she thinks she deserves----"

"Ugh!" shuddered the widow, putting her hands over her eyes, "that
would be like writing your epitaph and choosing the style of your
coffin."

"And every man," pursued the bachelor, "would be willing to give his
wife her board and room and a salary adequate to her services and to his
income----"

"And to let her eat with the family," jeered the widow.

"Well," finished the bachelor, "then marriage wouldn't offer the poorest
returns in the professional market. And, besides," he added, "there
would be fewer wives sitting about in apartment hotels holding their
hands and ordering the bellboys around, while their husbands are down
town fretting and struggling themselves into bankruptcy; and fewer
husbands spending their nights and their money out with the boys, while
their wives are bending over the cook stove and the sewing machine,
trying to make ends meet on nothing a year."

"But that," cried the widow, taking her hands down from her eyes, "would
mean spending your courtship talking stocks and bonds and dividends!"

"And the rest of your life forgetting them and talking love," declared
the bachelor, triumphantly.

The widow looked up speculatively.

"Well--perhaps," she acquiesced, "if courtship were more of a business
proposition marriage would be less of a failure. Anyhow, you'd know in
advance just what a man considered you worth in dollars and cents."

"And you'd eliminate all the uncertainty," added the bachelor.

"And the chance of having to beg for your carfare and pin money."

"And of having to go bankrupt for matinee tickets and Easter hats."

"And of being asked what you did with your allowance."

"Or of how you acquired your breath or lost your watch."

"The trouble is," sighed the widow, "that no man would ever be broad
enough or generous enough to make such a proposition."

"And no woman would ever be sensible enough to listen to it."

"Nonsense. Any woman would. It's just the sort of thing we've been
longing for."

"Well," said the bachelor, turning on his back and looking up at the
widow speculatively, "let me see--you could have the violet room."

"What!" exclaimed the widow.

"It's got a good south view," protested the bachelor, "and besides it's
not over the kitchen."

"What on earth do you mean?" The widow sat up straight and her bangles
jingled warningly.

"And you could have Saturday and Wednesday evenings out. Those are my
club nights."

"How dare you!"

"And any salary you might ask--"

"What are you talking about, Billy Travers?"

[Illustration: "YOU'VE taken all the poetry out of it." _Page 72_]

"I'm making you a proposal of marriage," explained the bachelor in an
injured tone. "Don't you recognize it?"

The widow rose silently, lifted the sheet of paper in her hands and tore
it to pieces.

"Was that your poem?" inquired the bachelor as he watched the breeze
carry the fragments away over the grass.

The widow shook out her ruffles and picked up her hat.

"You've taken all the poetry out of it," she retorted, as she fled
toward the house.

The bachelor looked after her undecidedly for a moment. Then he leaned
back lazily and blinked up at the sky between the leaves.

"And this," he said softly, "is the white man's burden."




VI

SIGNS AND COUNTERSIGNS OF LOVE.


"IF there were only some way," began the bachelor, gazing thoughtfully
out of the window of the dining car, "in which a fellow could prove his
love----"

"There are millions of them!" declared the widow, sipping her consommé
daintily.

"Those mediæval fellows had such an advantage over us," complained the
bachelor. "When a chap loved a girl, all he had to do to prove it was to
get another chap to say he didn't, and then to break the other chap's
head. That was a sure sign."

"And it was so easy," remarked the widow.

"Yes," agreed the bachelor, enthusiastically. "Is there anybody whose
head you particularly want broken? I feel remarkably like fighting."

"Of course, you do," said the widow sympathetically. "The fighting
spirit is born in every man. But duelling isn't a sign of love; it's a
sign of egotism, hurt pride, the spirit of competition, the
dog-in-the-manger feeling. Besides, it's out of fashion."

"Well," sighed the bachelor, "then I suppose I shall have to save your
life or--die for you."

"You might," said the widow, nodding encouragingly, "but it wouldn't
prove anything--except that you had a sense of the picturesque and
dramatic. Suppose you did save my life; wouldn't you do as much for any
man, woman or child, or even any little stray dog who might happen to
fall out of a boat or be caught in a fire, or get under the feet of a
runaway?"

"I've got it!" cried the bachelor, "I'll write a book of poems and
dedicate them to you."

The widow toyed with her spoon.

"You've done that to--several girls before," she remarked ungratefully.

"That's it!" cried the bachelor. "How is a man going to tell when he's
in love when he feels the same way--every time?"

"Have you forgotten your soup?" asked the widow, glancing at the
untouched plate in front of the bachelor.

The bachelor picked up his spoon languidly.

"No," he said, "but----"

"Because if you had," said the widow, "it would have been a proof."

"A--what?"

"A proof," repeated the widow. "Forgetting to eat your meals is the
first sign of love. A man may write poetry and swear love by all the
planets separately; but if he sits down opposite you an hour afterward
and orders mutton chops and gravy and devours them to the last crumb,
either he doesn't mean what he says or doesn't know what he is talking
about. When he lets his breakfast grow cold and forgets to go out to his
lunch and loses his interest in his dinner it's a sure sign of love."

"It might be a sign of dyspepsia," suggested the bachelor doubtfully.

"Oh, well," proceeded the widow, sipping her soup leisurely, "there are
other signs besides a lost appetite."

The bachelor looked hopeful.

"Is one of them smelling violets all day, when there aren't any 'round;
and feeling a funny jump in your throat every time you catch sight of a
violet hat; and suddenly discovering you have written, 'Send me eight
quarts of violets and a widow,' instead of 'eight quarts of gasoline and
a patent pump'?"

The widow leaned so far over her soup that her eyes were completely
shaded by the brim of her violet hat.

"Yes," she said gently, "loss of reason is one of them--and loss of
memory."

"And loss of sleep?"

"And loss of common sense."

"And loss of self-respect?"

"And of your powers of conversation."

"Nonsense!" cried the bachelor, "a man in love can say more fool
things----"

The widow put down her spoon emphatically.

"A man in love," she contradicted, "can't talk at all? It's not the
things he says, but the things he isn't able to say; the things that
choke right up in his throat----"

"I've had that!" interrupted the bachelor.

"Had--what?"

"The 'love-lump' in the throat."

"And did you ever go up stairs to light the gas and turn on the water
instead; or walk three blocks in the wrong direction without knowing it;
or hunt ten minutes for your shoes and then discover it was your collar
button or your hat that you had lost?"

"Or add a column of figures and get a poem for the answer; or break your
neck running to the office and then have to sit down and think what you
came down early for; or begin a business letter 'Dearest Smith' and drop
it in the box without a stamp, or read your paper upside down, or----"

"You've got it!" cried the widow.

"I know it," sighed the bachelor, "dreadfully!"

"The idea, I mean," said the widow, blushing. "Those are the real proofs
of love."

"But," protested the bachelor, "they aren't impressive. How are you
going to let the girl know----"

"A girl always knows," declared the widow.

"Are you going to say, 'Araminta, darling, I put on odd socks this
morning and salted my coffee and sugared my chop.' Accept this as a
proof?"

"No, no, no," said the widow, laughing, "of course not! But when you
arrive at her house half an hour before the time and appear at odd and
embarrassing moments without a rational excuse and get mixed on your
dates and look at her as if she were the moon or a ghost, and might
disappear at any moment, and sit for hours gazing into space and
moistening your lips in the hope that you will think of something to
say----"

"She knows that she's got you!" groaned the bachelor.

"Oh, she may not," declared the widow, cheerfully. "She may not know
anything. She may be in love herself."

"That's it!" protested the bachelor, "knowing you're in love is only
half the trouble. How are you going to know when a girl has reached the
love stage? How are you going to know that she is not just dangling you,
or marrying you for your money? They're so clever and wise and
coquettish and----"

"When a girl is in love," said the widow, "she ceases being clever and
wise and coquettish. She becomes mooney and silent and begins to notice
things about you that you never knew yourself, such as that your nose is
like Napoleon's or that you have a profile like E. H. Sothern and
shoulders like Hackett's and hair like Kyrle Bellew's. She never keeps
you waiting, but is always dressed and sitting in the parlor an hour
before you arrive and is never in a hurry to get home and will walk for
blocks beside you in the rain with her best hat on without caring. She
begins to 'mother' you----"

"To what?"

"To caution you about getting your feet wet and avoiding a draught and
wearing your overcoat and to look at you every time you leave her as if
she was afraid you would die before morning and--Mr. Travers, do you
know I believe this train has reached Jersey City?"

"Why--why--so it has! Waiter! Waiter! Where in thunder is that
blockhead? Why hasn't he brought us the rest of the dinner?"

"You forgot to order it!" said the widow, looking maliciously up under
her hat.

"Jersey City! Last stop!" called the conductor from the door.

The bachelor put down his napkin and rose.

"Check, sir?" asked the waiter, with accusing eyes.

"Were you forgetting to pay?" inquired the widow, softly.

The bachelor thrust a bill into the waiter's hands and started down the
aisle, followed by the widow.

"You forgot your change," remarked the widow, as they stepped into the
depot.

"Oh, never mind," said the bachelor. "Where are your wraps?"

The widow clutched his sleeve.

"I--I--left them in the dining car," she stammered.

The bachelor gazed down at the top of the violet hat with a triumphant
smile.

"Oh, do go back and try to get them!" moaned the widow glancing wildly
at the train, which by this time was being switched onto a side track.

"It will be at the risk of my life," declared the bachelor, "but if you
want--any more----"

"More--what?" asked the widow, distractedly.

"Proof," said the bachelor.

"It isn't necessary," said the widow, as she spied an excited porter
running toward them, clutching a pongee coat, a silver hand bag and a
violet parasol.

"These," said the bachelor, taking them tenderly from the porter and
tipping him, "are the most substantial signs of----"

"A lost head," said the widow quickly.

"Or a lost heart," added the bachelor, as they crossed the station and
stepped fatuously on to--the wrong ferryboat.




VII

A SHORT CUT.


"WHAT ought I to do," asked the widow, carefully licking all the gum off
the flap of a violet envelope and then trying to make it stick, "to a
silly boy, who--asked me for a kiss?"

"What ought you to do?" repeated the bachelor, laying down his cigar and
regarding the widow severely. "Refuse him, of course."

"Oh, of course," agreed the widow, rubbing the envelope spasmodically
with the end of her handkerchief, "but what ought I do to teach him
better?"

"I can't think of anything--better," replied the bachelor, charitably
reaching for the violet envelope and closing it firmly with his fist.

"How about just taking the kiss--without asking for it?" inquired the
widow naively, as she leaned luxuriously back among the cushions of the
divan. "Wouldn't that have been better--for him, I mean?"

"Would it?" The bachelor looked the widow straight in the eye.

"Well," replied the widow weakly, toying with some fringe on a satin
sofa pillow and carefully avoiding the bachelor's gaze, "he would have
gotten it."

"And now he never will," rejoined the bachelor with a confidence he did
not feel.

"Oh, I don't know." The widow became suddenly interested in the
arrangement of the fringe on the satin sofa pillow. "But it isn't the
man who asks a woman for a kiss or--or anything--who gets it. It's the
man who takes for granted."

"Takes--what?"

"Takes her by surprise, Mr. Travers," explained the widow, "and doesn't
give her time to think or to say no. The short cut to managing a woman
is not argument or reason. It's action. She may like to be coaxed, but
it's the man who orders her about whom she admires--and obeys. Eve has
never forgotten that she is only a rib and when Adam forgets it,
she----"

"Makes him feel like a small part of the vertebræ," interpolated the
bachelor tentatively.

"Naturally," returned the widow, tying the sofa pillow fringe in a hard
knot and then untying it again, "when a man comes to her on his knees
she is clever enough to keep him there; but when he comes to her with a
scepter in his hand and determination in his eye, she has a wholesome
respect for him. It's not the man who begs but the one who demands that
receives. It's not the man who asks a girl to marry him, but the one who
tells her that she is going to marry him, who gets her. It's not the
husband who requests the privilege of carrying a latch-key or staying
down town at night who can do so without fear and trembling, but the one
who calmly takes the latch-key and telephones his wife that he is going
to stay down town and then rings off as though the matter were settled.
The question of who's going to have the whip hand in love or matrimony
is decided the very first time a man looks at a woman and lets her know
who's master."

The bachelor flicked the ashes off his cigar and regarded the widow
curiously.

"Are you talking Christian Science or Hypnotism?" he inquired patiently.

"Neither," replied the widow, "I'm talking facts, Mr. Travers. Haven't
you ever seen a little short-legged man with a snub nose married to a
beautiful, queenly creature, whom he ordered about as if she were the
original Greek slave and who obeyed him as if he were Nero himself, and
adored him in proportion to his overbearing qualities? And have you
never seen a magnificent, six-foot-two specimen of masculine humanity,
who was first in war and first everywhere but in his own home, where he
was afraid to put his feet on a chair or light a pipe or make an
original remark, because some little dried-up runt of a woman had him
hypnotized into believing that he was the thirty-second vertebræ and she
all the rest of the bones and sinew of the human race? A woman is like a
darky, who fancies that 'freedom' means three-quarters of the sidewalk,
or a small boy who imagines that doing as he pleases means smashing his
sister's toys and stealing sweets from the pantry. Put her in her place
and she will stay there; but give her an inch of power and she'll take
an ell of liberty and boss you off your own door sill. The biggest,
boldest woman that ever lived is built like a barge, to be towed; and
any little man who puffs up enough steam and makes a loud enough noise
can attach her to himself and tow her all the way up the river of life."

The bachelor laid down his cigar and gazed at the widow in awe.

"And I never knew it," he whispered huskily.

"I suppose," said the widow, beginning to toy with the fringe again,
"that you've been asking girls to kiss you, all this time."

"Not _all_ the time," protested the bachelor.

"And, of course," continued the widow maliciously, "they've all refused
you."

"Not _all_," repeated the bachelor, pensively.

"What?" The widow glanced up quickly.

"Once," explained the bachelor apologetically, "I didn't have a bald
spot."

"When a man asks for a kiss," pursued the widow, thoughtfully, "a girl
HAS to refuse him; but when he takes it----"

"She has to take it, too," said the bachelor, chuckling.

"Would you mind," asked the widow, ignoring the last flippant bit of
persiflage and picking up the violet envelope, "posting a letter for
me?"

"May I look at the address?" demanded the bachelor.

"It's to the boy," began the widow, "who--who----"

"Took the roundabout way?" finished the bachelor, helpfully.

The widow nodded.

"I have written him," she explained, "that he mustn't--that it would be
best if he wouldn't come here any more. That will keep him in his place,
I think."

"On his knees?" inquired the bachelor sarcastically.

"And I told him," proceeded the widow, with a reproachful glance at the
bachelor, "how very rude and foolish----"

"Did you explain," interrupted the bachelor, "that the foolishness
consisted in not taking the kiss?"

"Mr. Travers!"

"And that the rudeness lay entirely in assuming that you might not want
to be----"

"How dare you!" cried the widow, flaming as red as the scarlet satin
sofa pillow behind her head. "I gave him a dreadful scolding!" she
added, looking pensively at the sealed note and toying with the edge of
the flap, as though she half wished it would come open again.

"In other words," remarked the bachelor laconically, "having him down,
you proceeded to wipe your feet on him. Since he had turned the left
cheek, you made him turn all the way round, so that you could stick pins
in his back and make him feel like the thirty-second vertebræ and----"

"I had to, Mr. Travers," cried the widow pleadingly. "It was my duty."

"Your--what?"

"To teach him a lesson," explained the widow promptly. "He's got to
learn that in the situation between man and woman there's only one
throne and that whoever gets up on it first wields the sceptre. He's got
to learn that the conquest of woman is not, like the Battle of Waterloo,
an affair of strategy, but like the Battle of Bunker Hill or
Sennacherib----"

"Or the Boston Tea Party or the Massacre of the Innocents," broke in the
bachelor. "But aren't you a little hard on the girl? If you get him too
well trained he'll beat her."

"Well," replied the widow promptly, "if he does she'll adore him.
Besides, it's much better to have the matrimonial medicine administered
in allopathic doses than in the little homeopathic pellets of caution
and deceit, and lies and arguments which end in the divorce court, and a
woman enjoys being bossed and bullied and ordered about by the man she
loves quite as much as he enjoys the bossing and bullying. It's her
natural instinct to look up, but she can't look up to a man who is
figuratively at her feet. She may struggle against the man who attempts
to conquer her by main force, but she enjoys being conquered just the
same, and it takes a great burden off her soul to be able to lay her
head on a broad, masculine shoulder and to know that every affair in
life is going to be settled and decided for her.

"She may talk about thinking for herself and voting and all that, but
she is always glad enough to sit back and be thought for and voted for
by some man who has magnetized her into believing him the incarnation of
intelligence. And any man can do it. If the average husband only had a
little more nerve and fewer nerves, he could master his wife with one
hand and his eyes shut. The heathen Turk can get along better with a
whole harem full of women than the civilized man gets along with one
lone, lorn wife. It isn't because he's any wiser or cleverer or kinder,
but because the first Turk learned the short cut to managing a woman and
passed the secret down in the family. They don't ask them to marry them
over there, they order them; they don't request them to run an errand or
sew on a button, they merely wave their hands and the women fight for
the privilege of obeying. They have known for ages what the white man
never seems to have learned, that the way to take a woman is by storm
and the way to hold her is by force and that any man can manage any
woman if he only knows how and has the audacity and the courage--What
are you trying to do, Mr. Travers?"

[Illustration: "I'VE got the courage at last--and the audacity." _Page
99_]

"I'm taking a short cut to the divan," replied the bachelor, sitting
down beside the widow, "and I've got the courage at last----"

"How dare you, Billy Travers!"

"And the audacity----"

"Stop! Stop!"

"And the nerve----"

"Mr. Taylor," announced the maid, appearing suddenly between the
portieres at this critical moment.

"Oh, mercy!" cried the widow, "and my hair is just----"

"Am I intruding?" asked a fresh-faced young man, entering briskly
between the portieres.

"Not at all, Bobby," said the widow sweetly, holding out one hand and
feeling her back hair with the other. "You arrived just at
the--psychological moment. We have been talking about you for the last
half hour."




VIII

AFTER LOVE----(?)


"WHY is it," asked the widow, swinging her chatelaine pensively as she
strolled down the avenue beside the bachelor, "that the man who is most
in love is most apt to get over it suddenly?"

The bachelor withdrew his eyes from the pretty pair of ankles across the
street and glanced down at the widow with the lenient smile of superior
wisdom.

"Why is it," he retorted, "that the man who drinks the most champagne at
dinner has the worst headache next morning?"

"That isn't any explanation at all, Mr. Travers." The widow's
chatelaine jingled impatiently. "Champagne is intoxicating."

"So is love."

"Champagne leaves you with an--an all-gone feeling."

"And love leaves you with--'that tired feeling'."

"Not me," said the widow promptly, "I always feel exhilarated
after--after----"

"Afterwards," finished the bachelor helpfully. "But you're a woman. It's
the man who has the 'tired feeling'."

"What is it like?" persisted the widow.

"Well," the bachelor flipped his cane thoughtfully, "did you ever eat a
fourteen course dinner, and then go to Sherry's afterward for supper
and then go to Delmonico's for a snack and to Rector's for----"

"I've been through it," sighed the widow.

"You didn't want any more, did you?" asked the bachelor sympathetically.
"That's the way a man feels when he's had enough of love--or a woman."

"But--but love isn't indigestible."

"Too much of anything--love or dinner or champagne--is apt to take away
your appetite. And too much of a woman is sure to make you hate the
sight of her."

The widow's chatelaine was dancing madly in the afternoon sunlight.

"I don't suppose," she said witheringly, "that it would be possible for
a woman to get too much of a man!"

"No," agreed the bachelor cheerfully, as he squinted at another pair of
pretty ankles, "women are sentimental topers. They sip their wine or
their sentiment slowly and comfortably; they don't gulp it down like a
man. That's why the man has usually finished the bottle before the woman
has touched her glass. He is ready to turn out the lights and put an end
to the affair just as she has begun to get really interested. But," and
the bachelor turned suddenly upon the widow, "who is the man? Show him
to me!" and he brought his cane down fiercely on the sidewalk.

"Wh-what man?" asked the widow, turning pink to the tips of her ears.

"The man who has jilt--gotten over it. I don't see how it's possible,"
he added thoughtfully, "with you."

"Me!" The widow's voice was as chill and crisp as the autumn air. "I
wish," she added musingly, "that I knew how to patch it up."

"That's right!" retorted the bachelor. "Try to revive his interest in
champagne by offering it to him--the morning after. What he needs, my
dear lady, is--ice. When he has had a little ice and a little tabasco
sauce----"

"He may want more champagne?" asked the widow hopefully.

"Yes," replied the bachelor, swinging his cane cheerfully, "but not from
the same bottle. Will women ever learn," he mused, "that it is as
impossible to revive a man's interest in a woman he has completely
gotten over loving as to make him want stale champagne with all the
fizz gone out of it?"

"I don't see why," said the widow. "A woman often falls in love with the
same man twice."

"Because she never falls too much in love with him--once," explained the
bachelor.

The widow's chatelaine rattled indignantly.

"Nonsense!" she cried, "A woman's love is always stronger and deeper
than a man's."

"But it isn't so effervescent. She is a natural miser and she hoards her
feelings. A man flings his sentiment about like a prodigal and naturally
when it's all gone--there isn't any left."

"Is that when he gets the 'tired feeling?'" inquired the widow
sympathetically.

"Yes," said the bachelor, "and nothing is worse than waking up in the
morning with a dark brown taste in your mouth--to find the woman
standing before you offering you more champagne. But she always does. A
woman never seems to know when the logical conclusion of a love affair
has arrived. She clings with all her strength to the tattered remnants
of sentiment and shuts her eyes and tries to make believe it isn't
morning, when she ought to go away----"

"And let him sleep it off," suggested the widow.

"That's it," agreed the bachelor, "I once knew a man who was infatuated
with a woman who used attar of roses on her gloves and things. When he
woke up--I beg your pardon--after they had broken off, he never could
abide the smell of roses."

"I suppose," said the widow, holding her muff against her cheek
sentimentally, "it reminded him of all the tender little tête-à-têtes
and moonlight nights and the way her hair curled about her forehead and
the way she used to smile at him, and of her gloves and her ruffles and
the color of her eyes and----"

"It didn't!" said the bachelor emphatically. "It nauseated him. It's the
woman who always remembers the pleasant part of a love affair. A man
remembers only--the next morning--and the hard time he had getting out
of it."

"And the headache," added the widow.

"And the 'tired feeling'."

"And the other woman," suggested the widow contemptuously.

"Yes," agreed the bachelor, "the other woman, of course. But," he added
thoughtfully, "if a woman could only take the hint in time----"

"What time?" asked the widow. "When a man begins to be late for his
engagements?"

"Yes; or to forget them altogether."

"And to make excuses and enlarge on his rush of business."

"And to seem abstracted during the conversation."

"And to stop noticing her jokes or her frocks or the way she does her
hair."

"And to stay away from places where he could be sure to meet her."

"But," protested the widow, "they always make such plausible excuses."

"Nothing," said the bachelor confidently, "will keep a man away from a
woman except a lack of interest in her----"

"Or an interest in another woman," added the widow promptly. "But," she
concluded tentatively, "there ought to be a cure for it."

"For what? The other woman?"

"That tired feeling, Mr. Travers."

"There isn't any cure," replied the bachelor promptly, "but there's a
good preventive. When you were a very little girl," he continued
patronizingly, "and liked jam----"

"I like it now!" declared the widow.

"How did your mother manage to preserve your interest in it?"

"She took the jam away, Mr. Travers, and put it on the top shelf
always--just before I had had enough."

"Well, that's the way to preserve a man's interest in a woman," declared
the bachelor. "Deal yourself out to him in homeopathic doses. Put
yourself on the top shelf, where it is hard for him to get at you. Feed
him sugar out of a teaspoon; don't pass him the whole sugar bowl. Then
he will be always begging for more. One only wants more of anything that
one can't get enough of, you know. Now, if a woman would use her
judgment----"

"As if a woman in love had any judgment!" mocked the widow.

"That's it!" sighed the bachelor, "She never has. She just lays the
whole feast before the man, flings all her charms at his head at once,
surfeits him with the champagne of her wit and lets him eat all the
sugar off his cake right away. The love affair springs up like a
mushroom and--"

"Oh, well," interrupted the widow impatiently, "I like mushroom love
affairs. I like a man who can fling himself headlong into an affair
and----"

"Of course you do!" sighed the bachelor, "every woman does. The sensible
and temperate man who will love her all his life----"

"A little!" said the widow contemptuously.

"Well, a little is enough," retorted the bachelor, "at a time."

"That depends," said the widow, "on how many times--one is loved. There
are some women who are so saving of their sugar and frugal with their
sentiment that they never know the real joy of a grand passion or of
having a man love them properly. What's the use of having money if you
are always going to keep it in the bank?" she added conclusively.

The bachelor looked down at her and said nothing. There was a smile of
hopeless resignation in his eyes.

"Here we are!" cried the widow, suddenly stopping in front of a tall
brownstone house and holding out her hand politely. "So glad to
have----"

"Aren't you going to invite me in?" demanded the bachelor, in
astonishment.

The widow lifted her eyebrows in faint surprise.

"What," she asked sweetly, "after----"

"You broke an engagement with me last night!" blurted out the bachelor,
looking the widow straight in the eyes. But the widow shifted her gaze
to the park across the street and swung her chatelaine indifferently.

"And you weren't 'at home' to me the day before yesterday and you were
out of town for a week before that; and you promised me that this
afternoon----"

"Did I?" asked the widow, looking up innocently.

"Yes, you did!" declared the bachelor.

"Oh, well," laughed the widow, as she tripped up the steps with a wave
of her muff, "I was only showing you the sugar bowl; but I didn't mean
you could have another spoonful; besides," she added, turning round and
talking through the tunnel in her muff, "there's somebody waiting
inside."

"Who?" demanded the bachelor.

"The man with the 'tired feeling'," said the widow.

"But," began the bachelor in a puzzled voice, "if he is tired of--of
you----"

"Me!" the widow laughed. "He isn't tired of me, Mr. Travers. It's--the
other woman. He came to me for--for----"

"A bracer?" suggested the bachelor. "What are you going to give him?" he
added.

"Vinegar, mustard, pepper, salt," said the widow counting off the
buttons of her coat, child fashion.

The bachelor looked at her out of the corner of his eye.

"Anything else?" he asked.

"A little--ice," said the widow, gazing out over the park.

"Anything else?" persisted the bachelor.

The widow studied her muff musingly.

"Oh--I don't know," she said, doubtfully.

"Any--sugar?" demanded the bachelor.

The widow shook her head smilingly.

"No," she said, "I'm saving that for another----"

"Another!"

"Another time," said the widow ambiguously as she let the door close
softly behind her.




IX

HER WAY.


"THERE," said the bachelor, as he nodded amiably at the big,
jolly-looking man beside the little, weazened woman, "is the best
husband the Lord ever made!"

"The Lord!" said the widow scornfully. "It isn't the Lord who makes
husbands. It's the wife!"

"And I always thought God made Adam," sighed the bachelor, humbly.

"Adam," said the widow promptly, as she dropped another lump of sugar
into her tea, "wasn't a husband. He was only a man. And a man is
only--raw material. He is like a ready-made frock or a ready-made coat;
he has got to be cut down and built up and ironed out and taken in and
to have all the raw edges trimmed off before he is properly----"

"Finished?" suggested the bachelor.

The widow nodded cheerfully.

"Yes," she agreed, "and adjusted to matrimony. And even then sometimes
he is a dreadful botch."

"And all his style is gone," sighed the bachelor.

The widow studied her Sévres cup thoughtfully.

"Well," she admitted, "sometimes the material is so bad or so skimpy--"

"So--what?"

The widow smiled patiently.

"Skimpy," she repeated. "There is so little to some men that the
cleverest woman couldn't patch them up into a full-sized specimen. They
are like the odds and ends left on the remnant counter. You have to do
the best you can with them and then use Christian Science to make
yourself believe they are all there and that the patches don't show.
Haven't you ever seen magnificent women trailing little annexes after
them like echoes or--or----"

"Captives in the wake of a conquering queen?" broke in the bachelor.

The widow studied her Sévres cup as the purple plume on her hat danced.

"Those," she exclaimed, "are the bargain-counter husbands, picked up at
the last moment and made over to fit the situation--which they never
do."

The bachelor set down his teacup with the light of revelation in his
eyes.

"And I always thought," he exclaimed solemnly, "that they were picked
out on purpose to act as shadows or--or satellites."

"Picked out!" echoed the widow mockingly. "As if all women wouldn't be
married to Greek gods or Napoleon Bonapartes or Wellingtons or Byrons if
they could 'pick out' a husband. Husbands are like Christmas gifts. You
can't choose them. You've just got to sit down and wait until they
arrive; and sometimes they don't arrive at all. A woman doesn't 'pick
out' a husband; she 'picks over' what's offered and takes the best of
the lot."

"And sometimes you're so long picking them over," added the bachelor,
"that the best ones are snapped up by somebody else and you have to take
the left-overs."

The widow poised her spoon above her cup tentatively.

"Well," she sighed, "it's all a lottery anyhow. The girl who snaps up
her first offer of marriage is as likely to get something good as the
one who snaps her finger at it and waits for a Prince Charming until the
last hour and then discovers that she has passed him by and that some
other woman has taken him and made him over beautifully. And even if a
girl had the whole world to select from, she wouldn't know how to
choose. You never can tell by the way a thing looks under the electric
light in the shop how it will look in broad daylight when you have got
it home, or how it will make up or whether it will fade or run or
shrink. And you never can tell by the way a man acts before marriage how
he will come out in the wash of domesticity, or stand the wear and tear
of matrimony. It's usually the most brilliant and catchy patterns of
manhood that turn out to be cotton-backed after the gloss of the
honeymoon has worn off. And on the other hand you may carefully select
something serviceable--dull and virtuous and worthy and all that--and he
may prove so stiff and lumpy and set in his ways and cross-grained and
seamy and irritable that you will cultivate gray hairs and wrinkles----"

"Ironing him out?" suggested the bachelor.

"Yes," agreed the widow, "and the wildest 'jolly good fellow' will
often tame down like a lamb or a pet pony in harness and will become a
joy forever with a little trimming off and taking in and basting up."

"Humph," protested the bachelor, "but when you catch 'em wild and tame
'em, how do you know they are not going to break the harness or burst
the basting threads?"

The widow considered a moment.

"You don't," she acknowledged grudgingly. "But there is a great deal in
catching the wild variety and domesticating them while they are young.
Of course, it's utterly impossible to subdue a lion after he has got his
second teeth, and it's utterly foolish to try to reform a man--after he
is thirty or has begun to lose his hair. Besides," she added, "there is
so much in the woman who does the training and the making over. There
are some women who could spoil the finest masculine cloth in the world
by too much cutting and ripping and--and nagging; while there are others
who can give a man or a house or a frock just the touch that will
perfect them."

"How do they do it?" asked the bachelor enthusiastically. "Take 'em by
the nape of the neck and----"

[Illustration: "IF we're such a lot, why do you marry us?" _Page 126_]

"Mercy, no!" cried the widow. "They take them unawares. The well-trained
husband never knows what has happened to him. He only knows that, after
ten years of matrimony, he is ashamed to acknowledge his own youthful
picture. He has been literally re-formed in everything from his collars
and the way he parts his hair to his morals and the way he signs his
name. The best husbands aren't caught; they're made. And the luckiest
woman isn't the one who marries the best man, but the one who makes the
most out of the man she marries."

"But," protested the bachelor, "if we're such a lot and such a lottery,
why do you marry us at all?"

The widow looked up in surprise and stopped with her cup poised in
midair.

"Why do we wear frocks, Mr. Travers?" she asked witheringly. "Why do we
pompadour our hair or eat with forks or go to pink teas? Marriage is a
custom; and if a woman doesn't marry she is simply non--non----"

"Compos mentis?" inquired the bachelor, helpfully.

"Well, yes," said the widow, "but that wasn't what I meant. What is the
Latin for 'not in it'? Her father looks at her accusingly every time he
has to pay her dressmaker's bill and her mother looks at her
commiseratingly every time she comes home without being engaged and all
her friends look at her as if she were a curiosity or--or a failure. And
besides, she misses her mission in life. That was what the Lord put Eve
in the world for--to give the finishing touches to Adam."

"She finished him all right!" exclaimed the bachelor fervently.

"Making a living," went on the widow scorning the insinuation, "or
making a career or making fame or a fortune isn't the real forte of
woman. It's making a husband--out of a man."

"I should think," said the bachelor setting down his teacup and leaning
back comfortably in his chair, "that they would form a corporation and
set up a factory where they could turn 'em out by the dozen or the
crate--or---"

"Pooh!" cried the widow, "a husband is a work of art and has to be made
by hand. He can't be turned out by machinery like a chromo or a
lithograph. And, besides, if you want a ready-made one you can always
find plenty of them on the second-hand counter----"

"On the--where?"

"Where they keep the widowers," explained the widow. "If a woman isn't
interested or clever enough to manufacture her own husband, she can
always find some man who has been modeled by another woman. And she has
the satisfaction of knowing exactly what she's getting and just what to
expect. The only trouble is that, in case she makes a mistake in her
choice, she never has a chance to make him over. He has been cut down
and relined and faced and patched already to his limit."

"And his seams are apt to be shiny and his temper frayed at the edges,"
declared the bachelor.

"And you have to be very sure that he fits your disposition."

"And matches your taste."

"And that he won't pinch on the bank account."

"Nor stretch on the truth."

"And that the other woman hasn't botched him."

"And even then he's a hand-me-down--and may shrink or run or--"

"Oh, widowers don't shrink or run," retorted the widow. "Matrimony is a
habit with them, and they feel like a cab-horse out of harness without
it. They long to feel the bit between their teeth and the gentle hand on
the reins----"

"And the basting threads," added the bachelor. "I wonder what it's
like," he went on, meditatively.

"You'll never know," said the widow, setting her cup on the tabourette.
"You're too old."

"Yes, I've got my second teeth," sighed the bachelor.

"And your bald spot."

"And I've sown my second crop of wild oats."

"And yet," said the widow leaning her chin in her hand and looking up
thoughtfully under her purple feather, "it would be a great triumph----"

"I won't be put in harness!" protested the bachelor.

The widow considered him gravely.

"There's plenty of material in you," she declared. "You could be trimmed
off and cut down and----"

"I'm too tough to cut!"

"And relined."

"I'm almost moth-eaten now!" moaned the bachelor.

The widow leaned forward and scrutinized him with interest.

"It would be a pity," she said slowly, "to let the wrong woman botch
you. The next time you propose to me," she added thoughtfully, "I think
I'll----"

"Did I ever propose to you?" broke in the bachelor with real fright.

"Oh, lots of times," said the widow; "it's almost a habit now."

"But you refused me!" pleaded the bachelor. "Say you refused me."

"I did," said the widow promptly. "I wasn't looking for--remnants."

"Never mind!" retorted the bachelor. "Some day you may find I've been
grabbed up."

"You'll have lost all your--starch and style by then," said the widow as
she patted her back hair and started for the door.

The bachelor followed, putting on his gloves.

"How do you know that?" he asked, when they had bidden their hostess
good-afternoon and stood on the portico saying goodby.

"Well," said the widow, "it would take an artist to make you over. The
wrong woman would utterly ruin you."

"And who is the wrong woman?" The bachelor tried to look into the
widow's eyes beneath the purple feather.

But the widow only glanced out over the lawn and swung her parasol.

"Who is the wrong woman?" persisted the bachelor.

The widow studied the tip of her patent leather toe.

"Who is the wrong woman?"

The widow looked up suddenly under her violet feather.

"The other woman," she said softly, "of course."




X

MARRIAGE.


"ISN'T all this talk about 'trial marriages' absurd?" remarked the
widow, laying her newspaper on the tabourette and depositing two small
red kid toes on the edge of the fender.

"It is," agreed the bachelor, cheerfully, with his eyes on the red kid
toes, "considering that all marriages are--trials."

"Just fancy," went on the widow, scornfully, ignoring the flippancy,
"being leased to a husband or wife for a period of years, like a flat or
a yacht or--or----"

"A second-hand piano," suggested the bachelor.

"And knowing," continued the widow, gazing contemplatively into the
fire, "that when the lease or the contract or whatever it is expired,
unless the other party cared to renew it, you would be on the market
again."

"And probably in need of all sorts of repairs," added the bachelor,
reflectively, "in your temper and your complexion and your ideas."

"Yes," sighed the widow, "ten years of married life will rub all the
varnish off your manners, and all the color off your illusions and all
the finish off your conversation."

"And the hinges of your love making and your pretty speeches are likely
to creak every time you open your mouth," affixed the bachelor,
gloomily.

"And you are bound to be old-fashioned," concluded the widow, with
conviction, "and to compare badly with brand-new wives and husbands with
all the modern improvements. Besides," she continued, thoughtfully,
"even if you should be lucky enough to find another--another--"

"Tenant for your heart?" suggested the bachelor, helpfully.

The widow nodded.

"There would be the agony," she went on, "of getting used to him or
her."

"And the torture," added the bachelor, with a faint shudder, "of going
through with the wedding ceremony again and of walking up a green and
yellow church aisle with a green and yellow feeling and a stiff new
coat, and the gaping multitude gazing at you as if you were a new
specimen of crocodile or a curio or----"

"It takes nearly all of one lifetime," interrupted the widow,
impatiently, "to get used to one wife or husband; but, according to the
'trial marriage' idea, just as you had gotten somebody nicely trained
into all your little ways and discovered how to manage him----"

"And to bluff him," interpolated the bachelor.

"And what to have for dinner when you were going to show him the bill
for a new hat," proceeded the widow, "and how to keep him at home
nights----"

"And to separate him from his money," remarked the bachelor,
sarcastically.

"And to make him see things your way," concluded the widow, "it would
be time to pack up your trunks and leave. Any two people," she
continued, meditatively, "can live together fairly comfortably after
they have discovered the path around one another's nerves--the little
things not to say and not to do in order to avoid friction, and the
little things to say and to do that will oil the matrimonial wheels. But
it would take all the 'trial' period to get the domestic machine
running, and then----"

"You'd be running after another soul-mate," finished the bachelor,
sympathetically.

"Yes." The widow crossed the red kid toes and then drew them quickly
under the ruffles of her skirts as she caught the bachelor staring at
them. "And--I've--forgotten what I was going to say," she finished,
turning the color of her slippers.

"Oh, it doesn't matter," said the bachelor, consolingly.

"What!"

"It doesn't matter what you say," explained the bachelor, "it's the way
you say it, and----"

"About soul-mates," broke in the widow, collecting herself, "there'd
always be the chance," she pursued hurriedly, "that you'd have to take a
second-hand one."

"Sometimes," remarked the bachelor, blowing a smoke ring and gazing
through it at the place where the widow's toes had been, "second-hand
goods are more attractive than cheap, new articles. For instance,
widows----"

"Oh, widows!" interrupted the widow impatiently, "They're different.
They're like heirlooms--only parted with at death. But it would be
different with a wife who was relinquished because she wasn't wanted. If
anybody is anxious to get rid of something it is a pretty sure sign that
it isn't worth having. It's nearly always got a flaw somewhere and it's
seldom what it is represented to be. Besides, I've noticed that the
woman who can't get along with one husband, usually finds it just as
difficult to get along with another."

"There would always be the chance," protested the bachelor, "that you
might get the party who had done the discarding."

"And who might want to do it again," objected the widow triumphantly.
"Just imagine," she added irrelevantly, "living with a person whom
somebody else had trained!"

"Oh, that would have its advantages," declared the bachelor. "A horse
broken to harness is always easier to handle."

"Perhaps," agreed the widow leaning back and thoughtlessly putting her
red kid toes on the fender again, "but when two horses are going to
travel together it is always best for them to get used to one another's
gait from the first. Don't you look at it that way?"

"Which way?" asked the bachelor, squinting at the fender with his head
on the side.

"Fancy," said the widow not noticing the deflection, "marrying a man who
had been encouraged to take an interest in the household affairs and
having him following you about picking up things after you; or one,
whose first wife had trained him to sit by the fire in the evening, and
whom it took a derrick to get to the theatre or a dinner party; or one
who had been permitted to smoke a pipe and put his feet all over the
furniture and growl about the meals and boss the cook!"

"Or to a wife," interpolated the bachelor, "who had always handled the
funds and monopolized the conversation and chosen her husband's collars
and who threw all her past husbands at you every time you did something
she wasn't used to or objected to something she was used to."

"Yes," agreed the widow with a little shiver, "what horrid things two
people could say to one another."

"Such as 'Just wait until the lease is up!'" suggested the bachelor.

The widow nodded.

"Or, 'The next time I marry, I'll be careful not to take anybody with
red hair,' or, 'Thank goodness it won't last forever!'" she added.

"That's the beauty of it!" broke in the bachelor enthusiastically. "It
wouldn't last forever! And the knowledge that it wouldn't would be such
an anæsthetic."

"Such a what!" the widow sat up so suddenly that both toes slipped from
the fender and her heels landed indignantly on the floor.

"It would be the lump of sugar," explained the bachelor, "that would
take away the bitter taste and make you able to swallow all the trials
more easily. It's the feeling that a painful operation won't last long
that makes it possible to grin and bear it. Besides, it would do away
with all sorts of crimes, like divorce and wife murder and ground glass
in the coffee. Knowing that the marriage was only temporary and that we
were only sort of house-party guests might make us more polite and
agreeable and entertaining, so as to leave a good impression behind us."

"I do believe," cried the widow, sitting up straight and looking at the
bachelor accusingly, "that you're arguing in favor of 'trial marriage.'"

"I'm not arguing in favor of marriage at all," protested the bachelor
plaintively. "But marrying for life is like putting the whole dinner on
the table at once. It takes away your appetite. Marrying on trial would
be more like serving it in courses."

"And changing the course would be such a strain," declared the widow.
"Why, when the contract was up how would you know how to divide
things--the children and--"

"The dog and the cat."

"And all the little mementos you had collected together and the things
you had shared in common and the favorite arm chair and the things you
had grown used to and fond of----"

"Oh, well, in that case," remarked the bachelor, "you might have grown
so used to and fond of one another that when it came to the parting of
the ways, you would not want to part them. After all," he went on
soberly, "if 'trial marriages' were put into effect, they would end nine
times out of ten in good old fashioned matrimony. A man can get as
accustomed to a woman as he does to a pipe or a chair----"

"What!"

"And a woman," pursued the bachelor, "can become as attached to a man
and as fond of him as she is of an old umbrella or a pair of old shoes
that have done good service. No matter how battered or worn they may
become, nor how many breaks there are in them, we can never find
anything to quite take their place. Matrimony, after all, is just a
habit; and husbands and wives become habits--habits that however
disagreeable they may be we don't want to part with. 'Trial marriages,'
even if they should be tried, wouldn't alter things much. As long as two
people can stand one another they will cling together anyhow, and if
they can't they won't anyhow; and whether it's a run out lease or a
divorce or prussic acid that separates them doesn't make much
difference. Custom, not the wedding certificate, is the tie that binds
most of us. The savage doesn't need any laws to hold him to the woman of
his choice. Habit does it; and if habit doesn't the woman will!"

The widow sighed and leaned back in her chair.

"I suppose so," she said, "but it seems dreadfully dreary."

"What seems dreadfully dreary?" inquired the bachelor.

"Matrimony," replied the widow solemnly. "It IS like those old chairs
and pipes and shoes and things you were speaking of; it's full of holes
and breaks and bare spots, and it won't always work--but there's nothing
that will quite take the place of it."

"Nothing," said the bachelor, promptly. "That's why I want to--"

The widow rose quickly and shook out her skirts.

"Now, don't begin that, Billy," she said, trying to be severe, "you're
too old!"

"Oh, well, I'm still in good repair," protested the bachelor.

The widow shook her head.

"All the varnish is worn off your ideals," she objected, "and the hinges
of your enthusiasm creak and you've got a bare spot on the top of your
head, and----"

[Illustration: "NO," said the widow, "you're shop-worn." _Page 149_]

"But I've most of the modern improvements," broke in the bachelor,
desperately, "and I'm not second-hand, anyway!"

"No," said the widow, looking him over critically, "you're shop-worn.
But, originally, you were an attractive article, and you're genuine and
good style and well preserved, and if----"

"Well?" The bachelor looked up expectantly.

"If there WERE such a thing as 'trial marriages'--" The widow hesitated
again.

"You'd give me a trial?" asked the bachelor eagerly.

"Oh," said the widow, studying the toes of her red slippers, "it
wouldn't be--such a trial!"




XI

THE WIDOW'S DEAL.


"WHO is the ideal woman?" asked the widow pensively, laying down her
embroidery hoop and clasping her hands behind her head.

The bachelor blew a smoke ring reflectively and squinted through it at
the widow.

"You've got powder on your nose!" he remarked disapprovingly.

The widow snatched up a diaphanous lace handkerchief and began rubbing
her nose.

"Have I got too much on?" she asked anxiously.

"Any," replied the bachelor, with dignified scorn, "is too much--in a
man's eyes."

The widow laughed and stopped rubbing her nose.

"But it isn't in his eyes," she protested, "if it is put on so
artistically that he doesn't see it. Getting it on straight is such an
art!" and the widow sighed.

"Black art, you mean," exclaimed the bachelor disgustedly. "A made-up
woman is like paste jewelry and imitation bric-a-brac. She looks cheap
and unsubstantial and as though she wouldn't wear well. Even granting
that you aren't half good enough for us----"

"What!"

"And that you don't come up to our standards----"

The widow dropped her embroidery hoop and sat up with blazing eyes.

"You flatter yourself, Mr. Travers!"

"No, I don't!" retorted the bachelor. "It's you who flatter us, when you
think it necessary to plaster over your defects and put additions on
your figures and rouge on your cheeks and frills on your manners. As a
matter of fact," he added decisively, "a man's ideal is a natural woman
with a natural complexion and natural hair and natural ways and natural
self-respect."

The widow sighed and took up her embroidery hoop again.

"I used to think so, too," she said sadly.

The bachelor lifted his eyebrows inquiringly.

"Before I discovered," she explained, "that it was just as often a
woman with butter-colored hair and a tailor-made figure and a 'past' and
a manufactured 'bloom of health.' The truth is," she concluded, stabbing
her needle very carefully into the centre of an unhealthy looking green
silk rose, "that no two men admire the same woman, and no one man
admires the same thing in two women. Now, there's Miss Gunning, who
wears a sweater and says 'damn' and is perfectly natural and
self-respecting and----"

"No man gets ecstatic over a bad imitation of himself!" expostulated the
bachelor.

"Then why," said the widow, laying down her needle and fixing the
bachelor with a glittering eye, "do you spend so much time on the golf
links, and out driving and hunting and walking with her?"

"Because," explained the bachelor, meekly, "she sometimes hits the ball,
and she can sit in her saddle without being tied there, and she doesn't
grab the reins nor call a 'hoof' a 'paw.' But," he added fervently, "I'd
take my hat and run if she asked me to spend my life with her."

"Oh, well," the widow tossed her head independently. "She won't. Miss
Gunning can take care of herself."

"That's just it!" pursued the bachelor. "The very fact that she can take
care of herself and get across gutters alone and pick up things for
herself and handle her own horse and beat me at golf and tennis, takes
away that gratifying sense of protection--"

"And superiority," interposed the widow softly.

"That a man likes to feel toward a woman," concluded the bachelor,
ignoring her. "Muscle and biceps and a 32-inch waist," he added, "are
'refreshing,' but in time they get on your nerves. It may not be immoral
for a dear little thing to say 'damn,' but it affects a man just as it
would to hear a canary bird squawking like a parrot. When a chap is
going for a walk cross country he may pick out the girl with the stride
and the strong back, who can leap a fence and help herself over puddles,
to accompany him, but when he is ready for a walk to the altar he
naturally prefers somebody who understands the art of leaning gently on
the masculine arm and who hasn't any rough edges or----"

"Sharp points of view," suggested the widow.

"Or opinions on the equality of the sexes," added the bachelor.

"Or on politics."

"Or the higher life."

"Or on anything but the latest way to curl her hair and make over a
hat," finished the widow. "Isn't it funny," she added thoughtfully
twisting a French knot into the centre of the sickly green rose, "how
many men idealize a fool?"

The bachelor started.

"I---I beg your pardon," he stammered.

"All a woman has got to know in order to wear a halo," went on the
widow, calmly fastening the French knot with a jerk of her needle, "is
how to keep it on straight. All a man demands of her is the negative
virtues and the knowledge of how not to do things; how not to think, how
not to argue, how not to nag, how not to theorize, how not to be
athletic, how not to spend money, how not to take care of herself, how
not----"

"You've got your ideas into a French knot!" broke in the bachelor
desperately. "You're all tangled up in the thread of your argument. It
isn't how not to do things but how to do them that is important to a
woman. It isn't what she does but how she does it that matters. She may
commit a highway murder or low down burglary; and if she does it in a
ruffled skirt and a picture hat any man will forgive her. Her morals
may be as crooked and dark as a lane at midnight; but if her manners are
smooth and gentle and guileless and tender she can deceive the cleverest
man alive into believing her a nun. It isn't what she says but how she
says it that counts. There are some women who could read your death
warrant or repeat the multiplication table in such a confiding voice and
with such a tender glance that you would want to take them in your arms
and thank them for it. It isn't what a woman wears but how she wears it;
it's not her beauty nor her talents nor her frocks that make her
fascinating, but her ways, the little earmarks of femininity that God
put on every creature born to wear petticoats; and if she's got those
she may be a Lucretia Borgia or a Bloody Mary at heart; she may be
brown or yellow or pale green; she may be old or young, big or little,
stupid or clever, and still wear a beautiful halo. The trouble," he
added, flicking the end of his cigar thoughtfully, "is not with man's
ideal but with woman's deal. She holds all the cards, but she plays them
badly. When a two-spot of flattery would win her point, she deals a chap
the queen of arguments; when the five of smiles would take the trick for
her, she plays the deuce of a pout. When the ace of sympathy or the ten
of tact would put the whole game of love into her hands, she thinks it
is time to be funny and flings a man the joker."

The widow laid her work on the table beside her, folded her hands in
her lap and smiled at the bachelor sweetly.

"That's just what I said," she remarked, gently.

"What you said!"

The widow nodded and rubbed her nose reminiscently with the end of her
handkerchief.

"Yes," she replied, "it isn't putting powder on your nose or rouge on
your cheeks or perfume on your petticoats or a broad 'A' on your accent
that shocks a man, but putting them on inartistically. It isn't the
things you do but the things you overdo that offend masculine taste.
It's the 'over-done' woman that a man hates--the woman who is
over-dressed or overly made-up, or overly cordial or overly flattering,
or overly clever, or overly good, or overly anything. He doesn't want
to see how the wheels go around at the toilet table or in a woman's head
or her heart; and it's the subtle, illusive little thing that he doesn't
notice until he steps on her and finds her looking up adoringly at him
under his nose that he idealizes."

"And marries," added the bachelor conclusively.

"And then forgets," sighed the widow, "while he goes off to amuse
himself with the obvious person with peroxide hair and a straight-front
figure. I don't know," she added tentatively, "that it's much fun being
an ideal woman."

"Who said you were?" demanded the bachelor suddenly.

The widow started and turned pink to her chin.

"Oh--nobody--that is, several people, Mr. Travers."

"Had you refused them?" asked the bachelor thoughtfully.

The widow blushed a deeper pink and bent over her pale green rose so low
that the bachelor could not see her eyes.

"Why--that is--I don't see what that has to do with it."

"It has everything to do with," replied the bachelor positively.

"And you haven't told me yet," continued the widow, suddenly changing
the subject, "whom you consider the ideal woman."

"Don't you know?" asked the bachelor insinuatingly.

The widow shook her head without lifting her eyes.

"Well, then, she is--but so many of them have told you."

"You haven't," persisted the widow.

The bachelor sighed and rose to go.

"The ideal woman," he said, as he slipped on his gloves, "is--the woman
you can't get. Is that the firelight playing on your pompadour?" he
added, looking down upon the widow through half-closed eyes. "Do you
know--for a moment--I thought it was a halo."




XII

NEW YEAR'S IRRESOLUTIONS.


"ISN'T it hard," said the widow, glancing ruefully at the holly-wreathed
clock above the mantel-piece, "to know where to begin reforming
yourself?"

"Great heavens!" exclaimed the bachelor, "you are not going to do
anything like that, are you?"

The widow pointed solemnly to the hands of the clock, which indicated
11.30, and then to the calendar, on which hung one fluttering leaf
marked December 31.

"It is time," she sighed, "to begin our mental housecleaning, to sweep
out our collection of last year's follies, and dust off our petty sins
and fling away our old vices and----"

"That's the trouble!" broke in the bachelor. "It's so hard to know just
what to throw away and what to keep. Making New Year's resolutions is
like doing the spring housecleaning or clearing out a drawer full of old
letters and sentimental rubbish. You know that there are lots of things
you ought to get rid of, and that are just in the way, and that you
would be better off without, but the minute you make up your mind to
part with anything, even a tiny, insignificant vice, it suddenly becomes
so dear and attractive that you repent and begin to take a new interest
in it. The only time I ever had to be taken home in a cab was the day
after I promised to sign the pledge," and the bachelor sighed
reminiscently.

"And the only time I ever overdrew my bank account," declared the
widow, "was the day after I had resolved to economize. I suppose," she
added pensively, "that the best way to begin would be to pick out the
worst vice and discard that."

"And that will leave heaps of room for the others and for a lot of new
little sins, besides, won't it?" agreed the bachelor cheerfully. "Well,"
he added philosophically, "I'll give up murdering."

"What!" The widow started.

"Don't you want me to?" asked the bachelor plaintively, rubbing his bald
spot. "Or perhaps I might resolve not to commit highway robbery any
more, or to stop forging, or----"

"All of which is so easy!" broke in the widow sarcastically.

"There'd be some glory and some reason in giving up a big vice," sighed
the bachelor, "if a fellow had one. But the trouble is that most of us
men haven't any big criminal tendencies, merely a heap of little follies
and weaknesses that there isn't any particular virtue in sacrificing or
any particular harm in keeping."

"And which you always do keep, in spite of all your New Year's vows,"
remarked the widow ironically.

"Huh!" The bachelor laughed cynically. "It's our New Year's vows that
help us to keep 'em. The very fact that a fellow has sworn to forego
anything, whether it's a habit or a girl, makes it more attractive. I've
thrown away a whole box of cigars with the finest intentions in the
world and then gotten up in the middle of the night to fish the pieces
out of the waste basket. And that midnight smoke was the sweetest I ever
had. It was sweeter than the apples I stole when I was a kid and than
the kisses I stole when----"

"If you came here to dilate on the joys of sin, Mr. Travers," began the
widow coldly.

"And," proceeded the bachelor, "I've made up my mind to stop flirting
with a girl, because I found out that she was beginning to--to----"

"I understand," interrupted the widow sympathetically.

"And by jove!" finished the bachelor, "I had to restrain myself to keep
from going back and proposing to her!"

"How lucky you did!" commented the widow witheringly.

"But I wouldn't have," explained the bachelor ruefully, "if the girl had
restrained herself."

"Nevertheless," repeated the widow, "is was lucky--for the girl."

"Which girl?" asked the bachelor. "The girl I broke off with or the girl
that came afterward?"

"I suppose," mused the widow, ignoring the levity and leaning over to
arrange a bunch of violets at her belt, "that is why it is so difficult
for a man to keep a promise or a vow--even a marriage vow."

"Oh, I don't know." The bachelor leaned back and regarded the widow's
coronet braid through the smoke from his cigar. "It isn't the marriage
vows that are so difficult to keep. It's the fool vows a man makes
before marriage and the fool promises he makes afterward that he
stumbles over and falls down on. The marriage vows are so big and vague
that you can get all around them without actually breaking them, but if
they should interpolate concrete questions into the service such as, 'Do
you, William, promise not to growl at the coffee'----"

"Or 'Do you, Mary, promise never to put a daub of powder on your nose
again?'" broke in the widow.

"Nor to look twice at your pretty stenographer," continued the bachelor.

"Nor to lie about your age, or your foot or your waist measure."

"Nor to juggle with the truth whenever you stay out after half past
ten."

"Nor to listen to things that--that anybody--except your husband--may
say to you in the conservatory--oh, I see how it feels!" finished the
widow with a sympathetic little shudder.

"And yet," reflected the bachelor, "a woman is always exacting vows and
promises from the man she loves, always putting up bars--for him to jump
over; when if she would only leave him alone he would be perfectly
contented to stay within bounds and graze in his own pasture. A man
hates being pinned down; but a woman doesn't want anything around that
she can't pin down, from her belt and her theories to her hat and her
husband."

"Well," protested the widow, studying the toe of her slipper, "it is a
satisfaction to know you've got your husband fastened on straight by
his promises and held in place by his vows and that he loves you enough
to----"

"Usually," interrupted the bachelor, "a man loves you in inverse ratio
to his protestations. The lover who promises all things without reserve
is too often like the fellow who doesn't question the hotel bill nor ask
the price of the wine, because he doesn't intend to pay it anyway. The
fellow who is prodigal with vows and promises and poetry is generally
the one to whom such things mean nothing and, being of no value, can be
flung about generously to every girl he meets. The firm with the biggest
front office is likely to be the one with the smallest deposit in the
safe. The man who swears off loudest on New Year's is usually the one
they have to carry home the morning after. And the chap who promises a
girl a life of roses is the one who will let her pick all the thorns off
for herself."

"Perhaps," sighed the widow, chewing the stem of a violet thoughtfully,
"the best way to cure a man of a taste for anything, after all, is to
let him have too much of it, instead of making him swear off. If you
want him to hate the smell of a pipe insist on his smoking one all the
time. If you want him to sign the temperance pledge serve him wine with
every course. If you want him to hate a woman invite her to meet him
every time he calls, and tell him how 'suitable' she would be."

"And if you want him to love you," finished the bachelor, "don't ask
him to swear it, but tell him that he really ought not to. The best way
to manage a donkey--human or otherwise--is to turn his head in the wrong
direction, and he'll back in the right one."

"Then," said the widow decisively, "we ought to begin the New Year by
making some irresolutions."

"Some--what?"

"Vows that we won't stop doing the things we ought not to do," explained
the widow.

"All right," agreed the bachelor thoughtfully, "I'll make an
irresolution to go on making love to you as much as I like."

"You mean as much as I like, Mr. Travers," corrected the widow severely.

"How much do you like?" asked the bachelor, leaning over to look into
the widow's eyes.

The widow kicked the corner of the rug tentatively.

"I like--all but the proposing," she said slowly. "You really ought to
stop that----"

"I'm going to stop it--to-night," said the bachelor firmly.

The widow looked up in alarm.

"Oh, you don't have to commence keeping your resolutions until to-morrow
morning," she said quickly.

"And you are going to stop refusing me--to-night," continued the
bachelor firmly.

The widow studied the corner of the rug with great concern.

[Illustration: "OH don't. In a moment we'll be making promises." _Page
177_]

"And," went on the bachelor, taking something from his pocket and toying
with it thoughtfully, "you are going to put on this ring"--he leaned
over, caught the widow's hand and slipped the glittering thing on her
third finger. "Now," he began, "you are going to say that you will----"

The widow sprang up suddenly.

"Oh, don't, don't, don't!" she cried. "In a moment we'll be making
promises."

"We don't need to," said the bachelor, leaning back nonchalantly, "we
can begin by making--arrangements. Would you prefer to live in town or
at Tuxedo? And do you think Europe or Bermuda the best place for
the----"

"Bermuda, by all means," broke in the widow, "and I wish you'd have that
hideous portico taken off your town house, Billy, and----" But the rest
of her words were smothered in the bachelor's coat lapel--and something
else.

"Then you do mean to marry me, after all?" cried the bachelor
triumphantly.

The widow gasped for breath and patted her hair anxiously.

"I--I meant to marry you all the time!" she cried, "But I never thought
you were really in earnest and----"

"'Methinks'," quoted the bachelor happily, "'that neither of us did
protest too much.' We haven't made any promises, you know."

"Not one," rejoined the widow promptly, "as to my flirting."

"Nor as to my clubs."

"Nor as to my relatives."

"Nor my cigars."

"And we won't make any vows," cried the widow, "except marriage vows."

"And New Year's irresolutions," added the bachelor.

"Listen," cried the widow softly, with her fingers on her lips.

A peal of a thousand silver bells rang out on the midnight air.

"The chimes!" exclaimed the widow. "They're full of promises!"

"I thought it sounded like a wedding bell," said the bachelor,
disappointedly.

"Maybe," said the widow, "it was only Love--ringing off."

       *       *       *       *       *

Transcriber's Notes:

Obvious punctuation errors repaired.

Page 11, "irresistable" changed to "irresistible" (alluring and
irresistible)

Page 21, "Appollo" changed to "Apollo" (face of an Apollo)

Page 51, "bachelor" changed to "bachelors" (bachelors successfully
resist)

Page 53, "etherial" changed to "ethereal" (and ethereal, and)

Page 120, "as the" added to the text (as the purple plume)







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