We hate this “handy” love-making, we girls.  You needn’t think we don’t know it when we hear it.  Sometimes we are not so stupid as we pretend.  But we never let you see that we are clever enough to understand you, because you don’t want us to.  And I must say that I cannot blame you.  If we girls are pretending to you that we have been waiting all our lives for just you, we dislike to have you discover that we have employed those years of waiting very satisfactorily to ourselves, so much so that a casual observer would not have suspected the emptiness of them.

So your funny little pretences are all very well, provided you do not let us catch you in them.  Only—­possibly you do not know how many times we do catch you.  That is one of the chief points.  You never know how many times we see through you and beyond, and know just why you did certain things much better than you yourselves know it.  Of course, it would not be wise for us to tell you this individually, for that would break up the meeting; but there is no harm in letting you know in bulk.

I suppose there is not a man in the world who would not be surprised if he knew that we do not consider men good lovers.  We have accepted them, and been engaged to them, and married them, and pretended to them, and, what is worse still, pretended to ourselves that they were satisfactory, but the truth is they were not, and they are not, and this is the first time we have dared to say so.

Now don’t expect, if you go to your wife or your sweetheart and ask her if this is so, that she is going to tell you the truth about it.  I wouldn’t either.  I would pretend that’ the others might be unsatisfactory as lovers, but that you—­well, you just suited me, that’s all.  I would have to, you understand, to keep you going.  And that is what your sweetheart will do.  If she did not, you would get cross and sulky, and there would be a week of unhappiness for both of you, and then the girl would apologize and back down from her position, and then you would go on exactly as you did before.

No, if you are going to profit by this at all, do not talk it over with any woman you love.  Talk it over with some clever woman who will tell you the truth because she has nothing to lose.  A man will always take more from a woman whom he does not love than he will from his own sweetheart or wife.

I wonder why things are so.  Is it that ideal love is only founded upon the truth and the superstructure is built of fabrications?  Is it that we women are much more artistic and more clever at masquerading the truth that we make so much better lovers than the men?  Oh, the scores and scores of men who have told me what their wives thought of them, and then the looks these wives have shot at me across the flowers on the dinner-table!  Only one glance, which no man caught, telegraphing, “Do I, though?  You are a woman and you know.  You know what I would have if I could, but how I have had to make him believe that he was all of that, because he is my husband.”  Not that she is dissatisfied with him.  Not that she would give him up.  Not that she would leave him or have anybody else if she could.  She loves him all she can, and he loves her all he wants to.  He has won the game, but he has not played for all there was in it.