THE LADY-KILLER.

Auckland Star, Volume XVIII, Issue 273, 19 November 1887, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE LADY-KILLER.

A Fresh Estimate of that Fascinating

Person, the Male Flirt.

Isr London "Society" a sprightly writer thus pinches the ears of the lady-killer: The male flirt is an individual not confined to our own days, nor yet even to our own century. From time immemorial this terrible yet fascinating person has scoured society, jusfe as the pirates and buccaneers of old are said to have scoured the seas, with their powerful and irresistible charm. There is a weird attraction about him, a fearful joy at his approach, a horrible and unnatural delight ac the bare mention of his name. Like the vampire of German fairy lore, the senses and curdles the blood at one and the same time; he is delightful and yet alarming, enticing and yet appalling, all at once. The male flirt is the terror of mothers and the detestation of the whole race of elderly aunts and chaperones of all kinds. We have all in turn been warned against him; all cautioned. to steel our hearts to his advances, and to barricade the portals of our souls against his serpent-like depredations. Yet so contradictious and so foolish is the nature of woman that there is not one of us, young or old, who has not at some time or other of our lives fallen a willing victim to this seductively dangerous individual.

■ The male flirt is made so neither by practice nor yet by education—he is born so; just as genius, or cooking or mathematics is born with a man, so is flirting in its higher branches implanted within him by nature. He is npb often a handsome man, although he is invariably a pleasant one, and he is not, as a rule, popular among his fellow-men. Fathers and brothers eye him with suspicion as something which they do not wholly comprehend, while husbands turn cold shoulders upon his blandishments, or at besb treat him with freezing politeness. Men, in short, look upon him askance, and one and all unite in running him downbut, perhaps, that ia only because they are jealoue of him.