OLD LOVES.

Oamaru Mail, Volume I, Issue 222, 8 January 1877, Page 2

OLD LOVES.

(World.) It is a trite saying that no man ever marries his first love. As that' feverish state generally attacks him when he is about eight years old, the proverb is no doubt correct in most cases. But "the only woman he really ever loved " does not cross his path until he is pretty well out of his teens ; still, in spite of a bona fide, engagement and its sweet accompaniments, she rarely becomes his wife. Thirty years after the vows, sighs, protestations, locks of hair, and letters have been forgotten, returned, or destroyed,- if he meets her again in the world; he will probably have good reason to congratulate himself that she did not. The meeting is not without its embarrassments and difficulties. "He has a hazy idea that he made a fool of himself from the beginning. Moreover, certain high-flown and poetical expressions occur to his memory, which he now' thinks must have been singularly inapplicable at any time of her life to the round-faced, jolly, full-bodied woman before him. Or his conscience may remind him that his retirement from the engagement was more creditable to his ingenuity than to that delicate sense of honor of which he flatters himself he is possessed. He undoubtedly avoided her brothers for some time afterwards, and took a short tour to renew that freshness which had long ceased to "fall upon his heart like dew." Or, worse still, he may have been the jilted one, and, though he smiles as he thinks of the agony of despair, the sleepless nights, the serious doubts as to whether he should wring her heart by jumping into the Serpentine, or wring the neck of his successful rivals, he cannot help wincing at the reopened wound of his amour %>ropre, and the .memory of his despised suit. "He feels sheepish and uncomfortable. He is conscious that no man is a hero to her whom he has loved, and by whom he has been bidden to ride away. Women who, if their cases were reversed, would secure the loudest legal reverberating thunder, regardless of cost, to carry their "wrongs to the xittermost part of the world, and to '' exacerbate " the damages, | are often those who rejoice the most over the now rejected lover whom they have lured into their toils only to dismiss severely wounded with ridicule and contempt. How old loves meet must depend entirely on fortuitous circumstances. If the lady be a mature matron, with half a dozen children at her back, She can afford to meet her first adorer with a dignified and patronising air. If he be a batchelor, she does not allude in so many words to the former love passages between them, and the tender grace of a day that is past. But in her grandest manner she extols the hairainess and advantages of married life, hints that men never know what is good for them, and that their too feeble grasp often loosens on opportunities that may never occur again. " Who wouldn't be the husband of the Gi'acchi ?" she seems to say. If he is married, she is not particularly cordial with his wife, tells her that perhaps she was not aware that a great intimacy had formerly existed between her husband and herself. After relating certain highly-interesting passages of their early loves, she produces her children, and dilates on the different education they receive from those of other people, as her husband will allow no hireling to approach them. She would also be very happy to call occasionally and take Mrs. Jones for a drive in the Park, or to see them in Portland-place to dinner "not one of oiir state dinners, you know, but a snug family one, Avhere your husband and I will be able to talk over old days.'i If the hospitable Mrs. Jones hopes that her rival will allow the girls to come and have a quiet cup of tea some afternoon, and be introduced to her boj's, the worthy creature bridles up, and, with an " 0 dear, no, we couldn't think of it," explains that she has had so much experience amongst her own friends of the danger of allowing young girls to form attachments without the authority or supervisions of their parents, that, "thanks very much, Mrs. Jones must be so kind as to excuse them." Thus, while the good soul amply revenges the spretaz injuria forma executed in youth by the innocent Jones, he lifts up his hands and thanks-Pro-vidence for the escape he has had, and that he is not as another man is. But it is a more serious affair when the old love is a widow, whose bereavement has been sufficiently remote to dispense with weepers, though not with the coquettish weeds that set off the pretty hair of which he once had a lock. They are terribly suggestive to the conscience-stricken winner of her young affections, of that period when, through his laches, she became a widow before she was a wife. He minds him of that day when in a fit of pique or jealousy, he uttered the memorable words which separated (hem for ever, and doomed him, a sullen

and disappointed man, to forswear marriage, and devote himself to whist at the Club and dinners in the Temple or Albany. "With what a subtlety of voice and manner (especially if they are at the table) does she lead him back to the times! "She had heard that he had never married, and she was sorry for it, as he must have led a lonely life. Even she felt more every day the loss of her late husband, although— " This aposiopesis is effective and suggestive. The quarry thus interprets it: "Although I was always thinking of you, and how fond we were of each other, and how happy we might have been together, but for that unhappy misunderstanding." Or it may be at her pretty house in Mayfair, where she is "at home " to him only from four to six, that lie himself again being seduced into the old toils. Sitting by the cosy tea-table, and performing those mysterious rites of Congo which confer a grace on the ugliest of women, he feels the well-remembered fascination stealing over him. " You see, I've got it still," she says in her pretty voice, just a wee bit cracked ; "it" being a faded flower, or torn cat, or what not, which recalls those early days of love, which somehow are never forgotten; and the miserable waverer sits dumb, staring into the midst of the coal. Of all old loves, decidedly the widow is the most dangerous. As for the old maid, poor thing ! she not stand the slightest chance unless she be of the gushing bouncer class. She is still empresses, in her manner, while preserving the coyness of her youth, chastened by the experience of a hundred flirtations. She does not care for young men now-a-days, because she thinks married men so much more agreeable, and that they j>resent a greater variety of talents of society. She is very intimate with their wives—at least she says so, and ought to be, if the amount of kissing be any criterion of the amount of affection existing between them. 111-natured people have asserted that the wife is only the proxy of the husband ; and, indeed, there is often a shuffling and embarrassing manner about the latter in her society. She is never weary of recounting her barren conquests, and according to her, everybody used to fall in .-love with her at first sight. But she ki lh \ Nl »e game is up with the elderly Adonis befHß her, and that whatever he thought of once has no affinity, judging from the peculiar expression of his features, with what he thinks of her now. She is perhaps the best of the three, though it makes him shudder to think of what might have been. But as it never came off, and a feeling of gratitude springs in his breast as he contemplates her, and rejoices that it didn't, let him send her an opera-box, a basket of peaches, or a Persian cat, and bid her farewell for ever ! But what of him who finally does marry his old love ? Forty years may have elapsed since he pledged to her those evanescent vows which a frothy glass of pastrycook's champagne and a maddening waltz of Strauss evoked. It may be at the same table in the same house that he meets her again after so many years' separation. The eyes have the former tenderness, heightened by a little art; her affection has mellowed (as she tells.him), like wine, with years; his memory has always been as fresh as is the slice of Jbie gras she is savoring appetisingly as her mind wanders back into the past. Whether he be a hermit of the Albany, or the astounded spectator of his motherless daughters' performances on the rink at Prince's, he thinks that, under any circumstances, many disagreeables may be wiped away by a superior person to look after him and his. The reliyio ?o«-with its old associations is too much for him, and he plunges. After that quiet half hour at St. George's or St. James's, "and they have driven off amidst the speculations of rude boys at the vestry-door as to "avlio those couple of old fools may be," a vivid fancy only can presume to peer into their future. Do they mutually agree to let the "dead past bury it's dead?" or does the bride of to-day demand inexplicable explanations of the past ? It is a fearful subject to contemplate. On the whole, perhaps, old loves, like old graves, had best not be reopened.