Well, perhaps I don’t.  A woman’s aim is never quite true.  I could not hit the bull’s-eye.  But in this case, please to remember that I am firing at a barn-door with bird-shot.

I don’t blame you for not believing me.  It is against your whole theory of life.  Not to believe in yourself were a great calamity.  My grandfather was so unfortunately accurate that with advancing years he came whimsically to consider himself infallible.  And when, urged by the clamoring of his equally accurate family, he sometimes consented to consult the dictionary, and he found that he differed from it, it never disturbed his belief in himself.  He closed the book, saying, placidly, “But the dictionary is wrong.”  He considered such a trifle not worth even getting heated about.  He dismissed it with a wave of his hand.  But there was a twinkle in his eye.  A typical man, you see, was my grandfather.  And, in consequence, a great many other people besides himself believed in him.

But to return.  Know, first of all, that you cannot cover me with confusion by pointing to your wives to prove that you have been successful lovers.  I never said you could not get married.  There is nothing intricate about that.  Anybody can marry.

Nor am I to be daunted by the fact that you have been so good a lover as to make your wife happy.  You may not be considered a perfect lover even if you have compassed that very laudable end.  In fact, the very ones I mean are the apparently successful lovers with happy or contented wives.

No shadow of a doubt as to your success as lovers has ever crossed your dear old satisfied minds.  To you I am alluding—­to the very ones who never gave the subject a thought before.  Wake up, now, and listen.  Your wives have thought about it enough, even if you have not.

Remember then that I am only trying to tell you, not why men fail as lovers, but how they fail—­in how much you fail.

Leave out all flirting, all precarious engagements, all unhappy Carriages, and presuppose a sweet, lovable woman, contentedly married to a real man—­a man who truly loves, even if he has not completely mastered the gentle art of love-making.  No skeleton in the closet; no wishing the marriage undone; with no eternal fitnesses of things to make the gods envious; no great joys of having met each other’s star-soul; with plenty of little every-day rubs, either in the shape of hateful little economies in the choice of opera-seats and cab-hire, or petty illnesses and nerves.  Just a nice, ordinary, pleasant marriage, with only love to keep the machinery from squeaking, and no moral obligation on the man’s part to see that the supply of love does not run short.  A great many men can stand a squeak constantly.  But women have nerves, and will go to any trouble to remove one which their husbands never hear.