THE GENTLE ART OF MAKING LOVE

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 3, Issue 3, 1 September 1924, Page 10

THE GENTLE ART OF MAKING LOVE

By LOLA de LAREDO

EVE TALKS FRANKLY TO ADAM

IT’S perfectly true, Adam, that there are as many ways of making love as there are of making soup, so that much as I should like to give you one simple recipe for life, I’m afraid it would be useless. You see, some girls like one method, some like another, whilst a few rare exceptions don’t like any. You need never hesitate over your lovemaking. You’ll easily detect the type of girl who doesn’t like it. She generally wears thick stockings, flat-heeled boots and high collars, and her figure would look just the same if her head were put on the other way round. 1 think we can leave her out of the reckoning, don’t you As for the rest of us, you’ll know by the way we receive your first kiss whether we’d like you to be all lukewarm affection or undiluted passion. Kisses, my dear Adam, are the hors d’oeuvres of Love’s banquet. They either stimulate our interest or make us positively dislike you. In any case, you won’t know how much you care for a girl until you’ve kissed her, so you may as well proceed to do so as soon as your heart beats irregularly in her presence. Sometimes we imagine we’re in love, until we kiss, and then we find ourselves unimpressed, stone-cold and disillusioned. Sometimes, on the other hand, we imagine we’re “jolly good pals” until we kiss, and though it was only meant to be a very platonic caress, we find that it has played havoc with our hearts and left us with a sol) in our throats. That’s the way with kisses, Adam—they often punish us for treating them too lightly. They are about the most deliciously dangerous moves in the whole game of love. Yet they are worth risking, for after all, love-making without a spark of danger would be about as amusing as a gramophone without a record. If ever .you feel inclined to kiss a girl, take my advice and do so with the least possible delay. It’s sheer madness to gaze at a pretty mouth in longing for years and years, and to continue to behave like a perfect gentleman every time you

meet its owner. Take my advice and behave like a man, and see what the gods will send you. Your Paradise may lie within the tiny compass of a kiss—you never know. Besides, a girl will always admire you the more for having made love to her, either because you do it so divinely or else because you were plucky enough to do it so badly. You, of course, know that there’s a tremendous variety in kisses, don’t you 1 ? I mention the fact because you sometimes commit the mistake of treating the love-of-the-moment to the kisses which you invented to suit the temperament of last season’s love. Never do this, Adam. Kisses that are worth having must be born of two people, not manufactured by one of them. I once heard a man, who posed as an authority on the subject, recommend to a seventeen-year-old ingenue the kind of kisses that are “light as thistledown with whole volcanoes behind them,” or words to that effect. But it’s to be hoped that the ingenue’s adorer would give her some evidence of the volcano’s presence before treating her to the thistledown kisses, otherwise the poor child would be dreadfully disappointed. Few girls would care to admit this, but I think you may take it as a general rule that we’d rather have the volcanic symptoms first and the tender kisses to help us recover. You see, Adam, we can get the mild, protective love from our parents, and if you weren’t an adorable brute sometimes we’d never consider you worth

leaving our mothers for. You wouldn’t be thrilling enough. Perhaps 1 shouldn’t tell you this, but 1 may as well confess that no girl would surrender to you if she were not convinced that you possess sufficient strength to make her. The savage streak in you always was, and always will he, rather attractive to us, so long as you preserve sufficient •tenderness and understanding in your nature to hold our hearts after you’ve conquered them. A woman may feel tremendous admiration for a man with a large brain and a narrow chest, and she may even lie a little in love with his soul, but she won’t want to feel his arms round her unless they are of the wrought steel variety. It is an indisputable fact, Adam dear, that where actual love-making is concerned the strongest character in the world could not compensate for inadequate arms. In this respect we’re dreadfully primitive. You may not think we notice the muscles beneath your carefully-cut coat, but we do. We are instinctively attracted to the man who cripples us with his hand-shake. We can’t help it. So, if you want to be adored, Adam, persevere with your cold baths and physical exercises, for your strength is a great attraction despite all the nonsense you may bear to the contrary about spiritual and mental love and the insignificance of the body. Fiddlesticks! Admittedly, a man’s soul has a good deal to do with our affections, but we can’t lean up against it when we’re tired. We need someone tangible to put our arms around, to hold to our hearts. You see, my dear, we’re discussing lovemaking, which is a purely physical quality backed up to a certain extent by appropriate language, and, much as 1 hate to admit it, I’m afraid it’s the natural law of things that the physical expression of love should count more than the verbal. For instance, I don’t believe that the eloquence of Cyrano de Bergerac, would have compensated adequately for such an unromantic exterior if it had come to