Doubtless the whole town helped to spoil him.  Doubtless he has heard all his life that the town was too small for him, and that a man like himself ought to go to the city, where there would be a market for his talents.  Doubtless he has conquered the hearts of all the village maidens; therefore he expects the same arts to win among city girls.  This system of easy victory and of yearning for other worlds to conquer, instead of making him fit himself capably for a larger field, has, on account of this absurd fault of irresistibleness, only made him superficial.  His crudeness is, to the uninitiated, almost pitiful.  Having never been obliged to work for pre-eminence, he descries exertion, and never admits that he has to try hard to win anything.  His cheap little accomplishments of singing—­badly—­possibly even of reciting dialect with realistic effects, he is accustomed to say he “just picked up.”  I often have thought that he must have picked them up after somebody else had thrown them away.  But they have been efficacious in his town, and in a larger field, with foemen more worthy of his steel, they are intended to enslave.

The irresistible man is too pitiful to laugh at with any degree of comfort.  The pathos of the situation is almost too apparent.  That is one reason why he is allowed to go on as he is.  It is why no one has the heart to try to correct him.  What can you say to a man whose confidence in his power to please you is such that at parting he says:  “I cannot spare you another evening this week, but I’ll come next Thursday if I can.  Don’t expect me, however, until I let you know, and don’t be disappointed if you find that I can’t come, after all.”

To be sure, you have not asked him to repeat his visit at all.  To be sure, you have nearly died during this call which is just over.  But what are you going to do?  We have a white bulldog whose confident attitude towards the world is quite like that of the irresistible man.  Jack blunders in where nobody wants him, and puts his great, heavy paw on our best gowns, and scratches at the door when we want to sleep, and gets under our feet when we are trying to catch a train, and makes a nuisance of himself generally.  But he is so sure that we love him that we haven’t the heart to turn him out-of-doors.  We simply endure him, because he is a dumb brute who is so used to being petted that everybody tolerates him, and nobody tries to improve him or teach him better manners.

Confidence is a beautiful thing.  But it is also one of the most delicate of attributes, and requires the daintiest handling.  The man who is confident with women must be very sure of a personal magnetism, or of sufficient merit to insure success, otherwise his confidence will prove the flattest of failures.  The only difference between the irresistible man who bores us to death and the successful man who is so fascinating that he cannot come too often, is that one has confidence with nothing to base it on, and the other bases his confidence on fact.