THE LOVE TEST.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17832, 28 April 1926, Page 12

THE LOVE TEST.

(By EVELYN VIVIAN.) . Moira was blissfully engaged—until a week or so ago. Now she is unattached once more, because she learned before it was too late that the man of her unlessoned choice could not pass one of the primary feminine tests of true love. The first time she was a little “off colour,” Moira naturally looked for sympathy from the affianced one. Instead, she got the knightly greeting: “Il’m! Been doing something silly, I suppose?” Poor Moira, thinking that it was his idea of a joke, men being traditionally awkward and embarrassed in sue h circumstances, tried to smile. But she could not shut out the picture of the impatient looks and gestures and her fiance's obvious resentment of anything in the nature of illness. Even the flowers he brought her were thrown on the table with a casual and almost cynical carelessness, as if the donor were intimating that tie knew this was the usual thing to do, but it was all very silly; and very weak on Moira's part to give way. The poor girl, in the first stage of a feverish cold, shed a few natural tears in secret after the departure of her betrothed, but still tried to buoy up her drooping spirits with the reflection that strong men were gauche in toe presence of weak woman’s sufferings When she discovered, however, that every time she was not at the top of her physical form her future husband-to-be grow more and more off-handed and impatient, she could no longer close her eyes to the fact that she had created an imaginary being, endowed with all manner of non-existent qualities, out of a very ordinary and more than ordinarily selfish young man, who hated to have his own little plan of life upset by one hair's breadth. Unattached. Moira' is not particular ly happy; but she has the. good sense to realise that occasional drab solitude is a state infinitely preferable to a union where sympathy—the particular kind of sympathy that is a woman's greatest need—is wholly absent. A man may be entertaining. cKariv.ing. and altogether * presentable” and delightful to look at and to talk with in a drawing-room, ballroom, or on a “joy-ride”; but if all his charm falls from him in a sick room, he is no woman’s man. Better single blessedness than marriage with one who is not merelv Insensitive to, but actually resentful of, anything in the nature ■>: what ho terms “feminine weakness.”