BERTHA BINGHAM'S VIEWS ON COURTSHIP.

Observer, Volume XXIX, Issue 41, 26 June 1909, Page 22

BERTHA BINGHAM'S VIEWS ON COURTSHIP.

" IF a man refused me when I asked 1 him to marry me, I should be simplyiairioas 1" ■••: TMb startling remark came from a charming girl of nineteen as she sat in picturesque idleness and gossiped with her -friend, Louisa Marsh, who had "jußt.run in for a chat." Louisa Marsh's life consisted solely in running in for chats. Whether it happened to inconvenience her friends or not didn't in the least affect her. She was a plain-looking girl, but thought a great deal about her clothes, and she was. fond of caramels. Bertha Bingham, on the contrary, was remarkably handsome, never cared what she wore in the morning, and would devour chocolate creams by the quarter-pound. "Good gracious, Bertha, what a thing to say !" Louisa exclaimed, stopping in the middle of pulling the 1 paper off a caramel. They had started talking about marriage and courtship apropos of the engagement of a mutual friend. " Yes, I should !" repeated Bertha, emphatically. " But you don't mean to say you'd ever ask a man to marry you ?" Louisa asked. " Of course I should, if he were the right sort of man. It would entirely depend upon that." " But if you asked him, you wouldn't be the right sort of woman." " That's jußt what I should be, because I should be the only woman with the courage of my convictions." '•Some people would call it something else besides courage /" Louise said sweetly. " I don't care a straw about seme people" Bertha retorted. "Some people are fools !" " If you mean me — " Louisa said, eager to take offence. •• No, stupid S I didn't mean you — at least, not just then. I'm not going to be told what's nice and youngladylike by a parcel of idiots. If a jolly, good-looking sort of man comes along and seems to like me, and yet be somewhat undecided whether he likes me well enough to ask me to marry him, do yon suppose I be such a donkey as not to help him to decide ?'* " Oh, I'm quite sure you'd never lose a chance for want of trying," Louisa said, with a saccharine smile " Bat don't you think your asking might decide him the other way ?" " Not if he-were the sort of man I could ask." " But are there any men just that sort ?" " Plenty. There are shoals of men who'd feel very much relieved if the horrid thought of responsibility and the / ' I-must-take-t^he-first-step ' sort of feeling could be taken oft their shoulders. Lots of men are too undecided to know which girl they really want out of, perhaps, half-a dozen. And think how wretched for the poor man if he fixes on the wrong one, and she accepts him !" " Yes, but how can anybody ever tell which is the right one ?" Louisa asked, with a poetic air of melancholy reminiscence. She had never bad a love affair, but she carefully cultivated the impression among her friends that she had had an unbroken series of romantic attachments. •« Men can't, poor dears !" Bertba said briskly, "but girls caß. That's where their intuition comes in." " I seem to have heard of intuition before," Louisa dreamily murmured. "Now men have brains — the bread-and-butterTgetting sort of brains," Bertha went, on, ignoring Louisa's sarcasm; "buc they've little or no intuition. Therefore, if one part of the human species must choose another- part , of! the human species to marry, and settle down and Be happy ever afterward, would you : >give 'ythe. choice to the part, that had 'i.vintuitfofl- or the part that; hadn't it ?" ;:;VT6 :^the part that .hadn't it," /'■-Vliomsaaiaid.'promptly. : '

" Don't be silly,, Louisa. You must haye y intuition when < you're choosing people instead of things. •You can choose things by the brain, but not people.' ' " I utterly disagree. You don't choose a man for his soul. You choose him because his collars are the right height, and he takes care of hie. hair, and his nails, and talks nicely and behaves decently. You don't want intuition for. things you can see with your eyes. I can tell if a man's nice by the wajr he parts his hair, and if he says 'How are you ?' before he says'' What a beastly day 1' " She wa6 thinking, as she spoke, of a certain Robert Clare, whom she had striven in vain to entrap into matrimony in a score of indirect ways, and whose collars she admired beyond all other men's. " No, you can't. Don't be so absurd," Louisa said. "It is the soul you choose. Otherwise marriage •would be a contract — a hateful, mat-ter-of-fact, revolting contract. I'd rather be dead than married by contract, even to a man whose collars were the right sort." • "Now, my dear Bertha, do have a grain of common sense 1 __ What, on earth would a nice man think if you went up to him and said : ■"* You have a beautiful soul. I have a beautiful soul. Let's marry ?" There are heaps of other ways you can show a man you like him." . " And they're all. artificial and false," Bertha said decisively. "If we don't ask them to marry us, it's just because we've never been used to it. It's just a habit inherited from our great-grandmothers." " A good many useful little habits have survived from the barbarisms of our grandparents," Louisa said demurely. " Rotten & little conventions," was Bertha's comment. " Lot 6 and Jots of shy men don't get a chance just because they're really so nice ; they haven't the cheek and conceit of the other men who aren't fit to black their shoes." "If they don't ask, it's because they're afraid to. I hate a coward." "It isn't cowardice. It's modesty. They don't feel good enough far the girls they'd like t*> marry." "Sweet. bashful darlings !" Louisa said. "I can tell you," Bertha said sharply, " that there are a lot more decent men going about than you've any idea of. I want to encourage them." " Who is the young man ?" Louisa asked inocently. ' What do you mean ?" " I mean, who is the sweetly modest violet of a masculine soul you specially want to encourage ?" Bertha laughed . " I've already done it !" she said, with a mischievous twinkle in her dark eyes. " It's Robert Clare !' Louisa nearly choked with the caramel she was then eating _; but she covered her rage and jealousy as well as she could, and spent the rest of the afternoon "dropping in for chats" on all her friends, saying catlike pleasantnesses about Bertha Bingham's views on courtship.

He'd had bronchitis several times. His doctors ordered " Warmer climes. But then, alas, the man was poor, Or he'd have pone away before. " Do this, do that," 'tis easily said, But poor men have to earn tneir bread, Thanks be, they may become secure 'Gainst coughs and colds by Woods' Pepper^ mint Cure.