[Sidenote:  The Ordeal]

In a girl’s early ideas on the subject, she has much sympathy for the man who has to undergo the ordeal of asking a woman to be his wife.  She thinks he must contemplate the momentous step for weeks, await the opportunity with expectant terror, and when his lady is in a happy mood, recite with fear and trembling, the proposal which he has written out and learned, appropriately enough, by heart.

Later, she comes to know that after the first few times, men propose as thoughtlessly and easily as they dress for dinner, that they devote no particular study to the art, that constant practice makes them proficient, and that almost any girl will do when the proposal mood is on.

She discovers that they often do it simply to make a pleasing impression upon a girl, with no thought of acceptance.  Many an engagement is more of a surprise to the man than to anybody else.

Because fiction comes very near to the heart of woman, she invariably follows its dictates and shows great astonishment at every proposal.  The women who have been thus surprised are even more rare than days in June.

[Sidenote:  The False and the True]

When a man begins to compare a girl to a flower, a baby, or a kitten, she knows what is coming next.  She spends her mental energy in distinguishing the false from the true—­which is sufficient employment for anyone.  There is not enough cerebral tissue to waste much of it upon unnecessary processes.

It is very hard to tell whether a man really means a proposal.  It may have been made under romantic circumstances, or because he was lonesome for the other girl, or, in the case of an heiress, because he was tired of work.  Longing for the absent sweetheart will frequently cause a man to become engaged to someone near by, because, though absence may make a woman’s heart grow fonder, it is presence that plays the mischief with a man.  No wise girl would accept a man who proposed by moonlight or just after a meal.  The dear things aren’t themselves then.

Food, properly served, will attract a proposal at almost any time, especially if it is known that the pleasing viands were of the girl’s own making.  Cooking and love may seem at first glance to be widely separated, but no woman can have one without the other.  The brotherly love for all creation, which emanates from the well-fed man, overflows, concentrates, and naturally becomes a proposal.

[Sidenote:  Written Proposals]

Other things being equal, a written proposal is apt to be genuine, especially if it is signed with the full name and address of the writer, and the date is not omitted.  Long and painful experience in the courts of his country has made man wary of direct evidence.

But a written proposal is extremely bad form.  A girl never can be sure that her lover did not attempt to fish it out of the letter-box after it had slipped from his fingers.  The author of How to Be Happy, Though Married, once saw a miserable young man attempting to get his convicting letter back by means of a forked stick.  The sight must be quite common everywhere.  Proposing in haste and repenting at leisure is not by any means unusual.