GENTLEMEN PREFER FOOLS!

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20335, 17 February 1928, Page 12

GENTLEMEN PREFER FOOLS!

" What are you "thinking about ? I once asked a man at dinner when, at the end of 10 minutes during which I had been holding forth on a subject that at ' the moment was interesting me to the exclusion of all else, I noticed that he was gazing intensely at me. " I was thinking how delieiously that light overhead catches your hair," he answered. k For a moment I felt' perfectly furious, for what I had been talking about was a matter of the gravest moment to me and my entire life, and. in that ho was a very great and intimate friend, I thought might be of some interest and concern to him. And then I realised that 1 had been in danger of committing the worst solecism a woman can conftnit. In other words. I had been in earnest about something | wholly unconnected with himself; I had «been taking myself seriously! For, except on rare occasions, a man simply hates a woman to take herself seriously, though he may take himself as ' weightily as a load of pig-iron ! A man in relationship to women, with the exception maybe of his wife, is always rather like a small boy with a butterfly-net. He likes to dash after the pretty creatures, and, having caught one, to watch it as it rests on his hand, admiring the sheen and flutter of its gossamer wings. He may be very kind and gentle with it, and during its brief captivity give it a very good time, but he does not want to hear its views about life, or listen to its 60ulThis attitude, often unconscious on his part, is undoubtedly a relic of tho days when man alone played an active part in life and it was woman's role to watch and* wait, and to keep the human and social relationships restful and comfortBefore we took on his responsibilities and mental outlook, man camo to us for refreshment and relaxation, and if now our robes coincide or sometimes even are reversed, wo, as serious, preoccupied, often harassed creatures, are too new a development to bo fully comprehended. It is undoubtedly sometimes irritating to bo paid a foolish compliment when one is internally aboil with some knotty problem crying out to be aired, but it is only another tiny bit of grist for the flexibility and finesse with which our sex has always been accredited. "If tliis is a clever woman, then give mo a stupid one," a man said to me once aftor meeting one of the profouudest feminine thinkers of the age, who tools her brain too seriously to dress nerselt neatly or becomingly. . If you can amuse and interest a man he will forgive you almost anything. He will forgive you for not marrying him. tor laughing at him, for spending his money for having thick ankles, even. But he will never forgive you for boring him. - "She has a great many faults, but she has never bored me yet," a man once said in my hearing of his wife not espociallv pre«y or clever, who had tantalised and tormented and disobeyed him for 10 years of a marriage that was apparently a perfectly happy one.