The Girl Who Has Had Experience.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXIII, Issue XVI, 15 October 1904, Page 63

The Girl Who Has Had Experience.

(By

Dorothy Dix.)

Ab a general thing the sophisticated woman appeals to a man as more enjoyable as a companion than desirable as a wife. He may like to spend his leisure hours in the society of a woman who knows her world, but when he marries he is apt to pick out some gentle creature who has, at least, the illusion of artless ignorance about her, for there is no gainsaying the fact that an impression prevails among men that the less a wife knows the better. This explains tihe fascination of the debutante, and the reason why men so often pas's by the cultured, elegant, socially experienced woman of their own set to fall in love with some rustic maiden with whom their marriages are as incongruous as the union of the Sevres jar and the earthen pot. To men, ignorance in woman still means innocence and absence of opportunity, lack of desire, when, in reality, they are as far apart as the poles. Still, this is a mistake that men almost universally 7 make, and, strangely enough, the older they are and the less exouse there is for their making sueh an error, the more apt they are to fall into it. If an old bachelor marries, for instance, he. almost invariably picks out some little girl just out of the schoolroom, with the aroma of bread and butter still about her, instead of some woman of his own age, who has arrived at his own cocktail state of experience, so to speak. The average man’s ideal of woman is still Eve before she ate the apple, not the Eves who refrain from eating apples because the fruit is bad for their digestion, so when his delighted gaze falls upon the ingenue he says to himself: “Here is the modest little flowerlet I have been looking for! She doesn’t know anything about admiration and adulation like the splendid big roses that bloom in the conservatories, and so I will transplant her to the secluded shade of my own home, where she will be perfectly satisfied just to shed her perfume for me. Heaven defend me from acquiring, for my own pleasure, one of the prize-winning flowers that every man that conies along has admired, for I apprehend that that kind of woman can’t live except in an atmosphere of perpetual adulation, and I do not care for any married belle in mine.”

Thereupon the wise man marries a young girl during her first season in society, firmly convinced that because he is the first and only man who has ever made love to her that he will be the last and only. This depends on circumstances. The girl may be sufficiently in love with him never to crave the admiration of any other man. or she may be so situated as to be cut off from it, and so safe, but the path to the divorce court is kept hot by wives who were married when they’ were mere children, and before they found out how intoxicating is the draught of admiration, and flattery, and love-making that man offers to woman’s lips. If a woman acquires a taste for this after marriage, God help her husband, for there is no cure for the married flirt. She may not be a bad woman. or an actually immoral one, but her craving for admiration is

like the hunger for opium. It grows by what it feeds on, and there is no limit to the depth of imbecility into which it will lead its victim.

If you will trace back the stories of the infidelity of wives, half of the time you will hnd that the woman was married when she was young, before she had experienced the thrilling delight of listening to a man's vows of deathless devotion, or had known the subtle sense of power with which a woman finds out that she can sway men by her beauty or her charm. Eew husbands ever make love to their wives, and so it is the woman’s natural desire for this courtship and this adulation that she has missed that leads her into seeking it away from home and in forbidden paths. l<ar otherwise is it with the woman who has been a belle before she was married. She has had her fill of adulation and admiration from men, and it possesses none of the charms of novelty to her. She has heal'd the verb w love conjugated in all its moods and tenses until it is as wearisome as a school exercise. She has played at the game of flirtation until it Has palled upon her, and as a. married woman she would no more think of finding amusement in carrying on a surreptitious love affair than a Paderewski would think of grinding out ragtime from a barrel organ. She has had all she wanted. She is tired of it. She has outgrown it. Above all, she has picked out the man she prefers, after Knowing many men, and the woman who has been a lint before marriage may be depended upon to bang up her bow and arrow wueu she marches to the altar, and never to indulge in the sport again. old negro ‘Woman once put tills matter pithily to me vvnen, in speaking of a frivolous matron, she made this excuse for tne flighty woman: "You see, honey,” said tne dusky phiiosopner, "juiss Ala’y done married 'Delore sire had any gal time, and a woman just meeged to have a gal time. Jit it don’t come while she’s young its got to come when she is old. Alias Aia’y is just getting her gal time now.” A profound truth is wrapped up in this homely axiom. The reason that the American married woman, as a whole, is more trustworthy than her Continental sister is that, as a rule, the American woman has had her girl time of lovemaking and flirtation, and tree admiration from men before marriage, while marriage first opens the door to these pleasures to the majority of European women. So, in reality, in choosing a wife the man who picks out a woman who has -been surfeited on admiration gets a preferred risk. Not so with the man who marries the ingenue who still has her debt of admiration to collect from man. Another mistake that men make is in flunking that the best way to assure themselves of getting a domesticated wife is to marry a woman who never has 'been in society. Men marry to get a home far oftener than women do. The city man, at least, seldom commits matrimony until he is utterly weary of the deadly round of social gaieties and until the sight of restaurant fills him with loathing, and the glare of electricity above the theatre door makes him want to run from it instead of into it. In his picture of domestic bliss he sees himself spending the evenings in slippered ease by his own fireside.

iiud Lhe mere oi u auoui in a WHesi wake lu uuiAs auu pa. oca uuu last inguts Ulla unu won sucu terror that lie leers ms omy surety ues iu marrying some woman wno wuuws uotuiug or uieiu. ■Never was a more raial error, firere IS no uluer woman in lire worm wuo is so ausoiuieiy crazy lor every lorm oi umuseiiieli. as Hie woman wno nas never wiiowu ally gaiety, and wno all Her ule nas been starving tor it. Mie is use a man uying oi iiurst wuo is souueniy piungeu lino a river vvaeie lie can steep niiuseu to Hie lips, f'eruaps sue nas never Deen io a sail uelore, and in. intoxiicauou oi dancing becomes a frenzy with her tnat makes aer ruau to go to every party to vvuieti she is niviteu. l erbaps sue never lias been to a restaurant neioie, anil the golden streets of tile new Jerusalem uo noi appear so desirable to tier eyes as to eal in a gilded public dining loom. Perhaps she lias never been to a J o clock tea 'before, and the inane clatter of woman’s tongues at a reception is like the music of the spheres, of which she can never get enough. f have seen a country bred wife, whose most potent charm in her husband’s eyes was her promise of domesticity, converted as soon as she reached town into the most insatiable of theatre fiends and restaurant goers, and a gadabout who counted every minute lost that she had to spend in her own home, and who could never by any’ stretch of the imagination tin derstaud why her husband preferred to have dinner at home and spend an even ing in the library, when he might be eating at a table d’hote down town and going to see a musical extravaganza. Nor is there any social climber equal to the woman who has always sat at the foot of the ladder and envied the women who were perched on the top rung. Almost without exception the women of whose insane extravagance we hear, and who 'bankrupt their husbands trying to break into society, by means of bizarre entertainments whose every feature is gold plated, are women who are not used to society and to whom seeing their name in the society column of the papers is a new ami undiluted joy of which they eannot get enough.