Why certain kinds of clothes are associated in the public mind with certain kinds of women is to me an amusing mystery.  Why are old maids always supposed to wear black silks?  And why are they always supposed to be thin?—­the old maids, I mean, not the silks.  Why are literary women always supposed to be frayed at the edges?  And why, if they keep up with the fashions and wear patent-leathers, do people say, in an exasperatingly astonished tone, “Can that woman write books?” Why not, pray?  Does a fragment of genius corrupt the aesthetic sense?  Is writing a hardening process?  Must you wear shabby boots and carry a baggy umbrella just because you can write?  Not a bit of it.  Little as some of you men may think it, literary women have souls, and a woman with a soul must, of necessity, love laces and ruffled petticoats, and high heels, and rosettes.  Otherwise I question her possession of a soul.

WOMAN’S RIGHTS IN LOVE

 “She has laughed as softly as if she sighed! 
    She has counted six and over,
  Of a purse well filled and a heart well tried—­
    Oh, each a worthy lover! 
  They ‘give her time’ for her soul must slip
    When the world has set the grooving;
  She will lie to none with her fair red lip—­
    But love seeks truer loving.

* * * * *

 “Unless you can muse in a crowd all day
    On the absent face that fixed you;
  Unless you can love as the angels may,
    With the breadth of heaven betwixt you;
  Unless you can dream that his faith is fast,
    Through behooving and unbehooving;
  Unless you can die when the dream is past—­
    Oh, never call it loving!”

In love a woman’s first right is to be protected from her friends while she considers the man whom she contemplates loving.  The well-meant blundering of vitally interested friends has spoiled many a promising love affair, which might have resulted in a marriage so much above the ordinary that it could be termed satisfactory even by the most captious.

At no time in a girl’s life has she a greater right to work out her own salvation in fear and trembling than during the period known among girls as “making up her mind.”  If she is the right kind of a girl, honest and delicate minded, it is nerve-racking to be talked about, and sacrilege to be talked to.  Then the bloom is on the grape, which a rude touch mars forever.

Yet these kind friends never think of the delicate, touch-me-not influences at work in the girl’s soul, or that the instinct to hide her real interest in the man precludes the possibility of her daring to ask to be let alone.  So they, in their over-zeal and ambition, either make the path of love so easy and inevitable that all the zest is taken out of it for both (for lovers never want somebody to go ahead and baste the problem for them; they want to blind-stitch it for themselves as they go along), or else, by critical nagging, and balancing the eligibility of one suitor against another, these friends so harass and upset the poor girl that she doesn’t know which man she wants, and so turns her back upon all.