The Girl With the Broken Engagement.

Woodville Examiner, Volume 3, Issue 284, 17 September 1886, Page 1 (Supplement)

The Girl With the Broken Engagement.

Broken engagements are, as a rule, rather rare things nowadays, for when a girl has captured a man she hangs on to him like barnacles on a ship’s side, and the affair is seldom broken off unless the man turns out to be not nearly such a Croesus as had been expected. Next to a long engagement there is noth* ing more forlorn than a broken one. The man who participates in it is the dreariest animal imaginable, and the girl would be nearly as bad if it were not for her pride, for as soon as the affair is really off and over with she fiuds out that she really did care for him, though heretofore she had been so busy criticising him that she failed to make the discovery. There is nothing for it, however, but to get what satisfaction she can in being jolly miserable, so she goes over her songs, and selecting the most appropriate, such as “Non m'ama piu t ” “Come back my beloved?” and “ Robair twor ker fame !” sings them over with great feeling, and then puts them away on the top shelf of her wardrobe under a lot of things, such as the bat that turned out unbecoming but too handsome to give away, and other such disappointments. Then she sits down and finds her life very empty and objectless, and so filled with peace that there isn’t any left for the next world. Then she goes out for a walk, and in the distance espies her two dearest friends, Clara and Flossy, and Clara and Flossy see her too, and both begin to say to each other, ” Oh, there’s poor dear Fanny ! I’m so sorry for her, poor thing I I’d no idea she cared so much for him! How wretched she looks ! Poor girl! Isn’t it dreadful?” and so on and so forth. And Fanny knows just as well what they are saying as though it were being shouted into her ear through a trumpet, but her pride comes to her rescue, and she grits her teeth and holds her breath to keep from changing olor. And then the three meet and kiss, and arc, oh I so glad to see each other, and each tells the other how well she is looking, although Fanny thinks she recognises a touch of patronising pity in her friends’ manner, and she leaves them vowing she’ll get even on the horrid things, and so straightway begins to look about for another man. It is not easy to find one, for the eligible men object to being taken up in the light of makeshifts and so Fanny has to put up with either a stranger or a very young boy; however, either is vastly better than nothing, and she parades him about and flaunts him in Clara’s and Flossy’s faces, and pretty thoroughly turns the tables on them, until the man finds out that he has been dropped—so to speak—into a dead man’s shoes, and then, oh deary me! how mad he is, and how quickly he disappears from the scene I And Fanny? Well, Fanny worries along for a few years, and then, as a usual thing, marries a widower. It is rather a come down, but vastly better than nothing, and we must remember all the while that, at its best, life is only a long compromise with misfortune.