Love is not a matter of infatuation.  It is not the temptation which is wrong.  It is the deliberate following it up, simply because the temptation is agreeable.  Of course, it is agreeable!  You are not often irresistibly tempted to go and have your teeth filled!

Men never will have done with their strictures on girls until girls achieve two things.  One is to observe more honor in their relations with each other, and the other is to learn to think.

ON THE SUBJECT OF HUSBANDS

 “All that I am, my mother made me”

Perhaps you think that girls do not know enough about other girls’ husbands to discuss them with any profit.  But if there has been a dinner or theatre party within our memory where the married girls did not take the bachelors and leave their husbands for us, we would just like to know when it was, that’s all.

I dare say it never occurred to these wives what an opportunity this custom gives us to study social problems at close range.  We girls are supposed to be blind and deaf and dumb; but we are none of the three.  We try to see all there is to see, and hear all there is to hear, and then, when we get together, we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t talk it over and tell each other how infinitely better we could manage Jessie’s husband than she does, and that it seems a pity that Carrie doesn’t understand George.

I suppose it would be rather handsome of us always to pretend that we did not hear the covert rebuke or the open sarcasm bandied about between these husbands and wives.  On the whole, I think it would be chivalrous for us to be utterly oblivious, and talk about the weather, if anybody asked us if we knew that Mary never could spend a cent without having John ask her what she did with it.

That is the way men do when they do not wish to tell on each other.  I think men are fine in that way.  We girls all think so, only we seldom have the moral courage to emulate their admirable example.  We are so fond of “talking things over.”  And if the married women do not wish us to talk their husbands over, just let them give us our own rightful property, the bachelors, and we will never utter another cheep.

However, I would not give up my small experience with other girls’ husbands for a great deal.  It has convinced me of something of which I always have been reasonably sure, and that is that American men make the best husbands in the world, and that women who cannot get along with Americans, and who think men of another race, who have more polish, more finesse, more veneer, would suit them better, could not manage to live happily with the Angel Gabriel.

Dear me!  If these dissatisfied American wives could only realize that an all-wise Providence had, in the American man, given us the best article in the market, and that when we rebel at our lot we are simply proving that we do not deserve our good fortune, they would never even discuss the subject of having men of any other nationality.