The pictures of distracted ladies, wild as to hair and vision, are sold in photogravure by countless thousands—­to women.  An attraction on the boards which is rumoured to be “so sad,” leads woman to economise in the matter of roasts and desserts that she may go and enjoy an afternoon of misery.  Girls suffer all their lives long from being taken to mirthful plays, or to vaudeville, which is unmixed delight to a man and intolerably cheerful to a woman.

[Sidenote:  Woman and Death]

Woman and Death are close friends in art.  Opera is her greatest joy, because a great many people are slaughtered in the course of a single performance, and somebody usually goes raving mad for love.  When Melba sings the mad scene from Lucia, and that beautiful voice descends by lingering half-notes from madness and nameless longing to love and prayer, the women in the house sob in sheer delight and clutch the hands of their companions in an ecstasy of pain.

In proportion as women enjoy sorrow, men shrink from it.  A man cannot bear to be continually reminded of the woman he has loved and lost, while woman’s dearest keepsakes are old love letters and the shoes of a little child.  If the lover or the child is dead, the treasures are never to be duplicated or replaced, but if the pristine owner of the shoes has grown to stalwart manhood and the writer of the love letters is a tender and devoted husband, the sorrowful interest is merely mitigated.  It is not by any means lost.

[Sidenote:  “The Eternal Womanly”]

Just why it should be considered sad to marry one’s lover and for a child to grow up, can never be understood by men.  There are many things in the “eternal womanly” which men understand about as well as a kitten does the binomial theorem, but some mysteries become simple enough when the leading fact is grasped—­that woman’s song of life is written in a minor key and that she actually enjoys the semblance of sorrow.  Still, the average woman wishes to be idealised and strongly objects to being understood.

[Sidenote:  “Tears, Idle Tears”]

Woman’s tears mean no more than the sparks from an overcharged dynamo; they are simply emotional relief.  Married men gradually come to realise it, and this is why a suspicion of tears in his sweetheart’s eyes means infinitely more to a lover than a fit of hysterics does to a husband.

We are wont to speak of woman’s tenderness, but there is no tenderness like that of a man for the woman he loves when she is tired or troubled, and the man who has learned simply to love a woman at crucial moments, and to postpone the inevitable idiotic questioning till a more auspicious time, has in his hands the talisman of domestic felicity.

If by any chance the lachrymal glands were to be dried up, woman’s life would lose a goodly share of its charm.  There is nothing to cry on which compares with a man’s shoulder; almost any man will do at a critical moment; but the clavicle of a lover is by far the most desirable.  If the flood is copious and a collar or an immaculate shirt-front can be spoiled, the scene acquires new and distinct value.  A pillow does very well, lacking the shoulder, for many of the most attractive women in fiction habitually cry into pillows—­because they have no lover, or because the brute dislikes tears.