Now I like men; and I like girls.  So that I never want anybody to be hurt at this very delicate and dangerous game of love-making.  But somebody always is getting hurt, and although she never makes any fuss about it, it is generally the girl.

There are two reasons for this.  One is that love means twice—­yes, twenty, forty—­times as much to a girl as to a man; and the second is that we are a believing set of human geese, and we believe a great deal of what you men say, which is wrong of us, and much more of what your pronounced actions over us imply, which is worse.  Girls are just the same along the main lines of sentiment and hope and trust and belief in men now as they ever were, and most of this talk about the new woman being different is mere stuff and nonsense.

Now, the men come in right at this point and declare that we ought not to believe so much; that until they have actually proposed marriage, often they themselves do not know their own minds; that a man has a perfect right to withdraw, a la Hamlet, if he finds insurmountable flaws in the girl’s nature, or, what is oftener the case, somebody whom he likes better; and they intimate pretty strongly that broken hearts, or even slightly damaged affections, are largely our own fault, which, from their standpoint, is true enough, and if we were men we would all say so too.

But, looking at it from our standpoint, does it not seem as if the men had all the rights on their side?  And will they be as generous in this as they are in everything else where we are concerned, and view the matter from our point of view, with the sidelights turned on?

In the first place, there is practically the whole world of women before men from which to choose.  Think of that!  Thousands of women, and with the additional advantage of the right to make the first advances!  How many do we have to choose from?  We can’t roam around the world by ourselves, even to see all the desirable men, much less manage to meet and study them. We have to wait to be approached even by the meagre few which a gracious Providence casts in our way.  If a girl receives three proposals, that, I am told, is a fair average.  If she receives ten, she is either an heiress or a belle.  If she receives more than ten, she must visit in the West.  Think now, reasonably, of the limited opportunities of the most fortunate of us, compared with the limitless opportunities of the least fortunate of you.

Then, too, in order to make ourselves desirable, we are not to be forward or unduly prominent.  We are to sit quietly at home and wait to be asked.  We are not to take a man’s words, uttered under the magnetism of our presence, for truth.  We are not to judge by his manner if he does not speak.  We are not to flirt with any other man when one man is considering us as a possible wife (although we don’t know that he is, and it is dangerous to guess), because