OVER THE TEACUPS

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 25, 22 June 1907, Page 52

OVER THE TEACUPS

BOUDOIR GOSSIP FOR LADY READERS . . .

Do Women Like to Be Swindled ? I)q women like to be swindledT Not consciously. There is no slander that a woman will resent quicker than the imputation that her real name is Mrs. E. Z. Mark, but all the >anie there is a strain of the Rube that runs throughout the entire feminine sex that makes it not only the foreordained purchaser of gold bricks, but enables it to have the time of its life while buying them. WOmen call this quality ” faith,” ‘•'confidence in human nature,” •’belief in the ultimate good,” and other high-sounding phrases. In reality it is nothing but an element <»f crass , credulity that nothing can put wise. Experience does not feaze it. for a woman who has been taken in ninety-nine times in a con game will cheerfully go up against it the hundredth. She doesn’t want to learn, and she doesn’t do it. Not a woman cau help this state of mind. poor thing! She was born that way. It is part of her sex inheritance. For our first mother started it. It is significant that the wily serpent picked out Eve. ami not Adam, when he wanted to beguile somebody into eating the forbidden apple. The serpent knew that the man would want to be shown, lie would want some proof of the benefits to be derived before he risked losing a good home, but the serpent knew that the woman’s credulity would stand for anything, and that she was just hanging out anyway, looking for somebody to come along and fiim-flam her into doing the things she shouldn’t do, and that it would be ruinous for her to do. He know that she would never ask for references or make any effort to investigate the truth of a statement. And she didn’t. It was such a pleasant spoken, gentlemanly snake in the grass, with such good manners and winning ways, that she took its advice on the spot. And this precedent has been followed by her daughters ever since. In spite of the way that women act in this regard, they are not fools, and this confiding attitude toward life is not the result of weakmindedness, but of preference. They are not deceived because of their ignorance and unsophistication, but simply and solely Iwcause they enjoy being deceived.

In her inner consciousness a woman knows that the glib talker who takes her in h a fraud, or that the glittering thing she is asked to believe in or invest her money in will not bear looking into or having the cold light of reason turned upon it. Wherefore, she doesn’t look. She shut- her eyes, and makes a leap in the dark for the fun ot the thing.

Women almost invariably lack the courage to investigate things. Facts throw them into an unreasonable panic. They would a million times rather believe a beautiful falsehood than to know an unattractive truth.

A thousand proofs that women are not only easily swindled, but that they dote on being swindled are the be found on every side. It is notoriously women, for in-lance, who form the following and finance the religious fakirs and faddists who infect society at the present time, and who make possible the culturine spreaders who go hlmhil organising clubs to study things of which they know nothing. N<> theory of theology or ethics can be so wild and visionary and preposterous, and no charlatan so blatant that women who are old enough and smart enough to know Iwtter will not espouae the one and support the other. All of us number among our acquaintances women who are always running after some long-haired man or short haired woman who is the apostle of a new creed. the principal tenet of which seems to Im* taking up collections, for the new religion differs from Hip old in that it ia not without money and without price.

Sometimes you see these women grovelling at the feet of a yellow-robed heathen. Sometimes you find them sitting up with an idiotic stare in their eyes, trying to manipulate thought waves. Sometimes they are cooped up in a malodorous room while a greasy Sybil is affecting to establish telephone communications with their dead relatives. Sometimes they are lean and hungry and stringy looking, because they have just espoused vegetarianism, or else they are frowsy and fat and bilious from having gone back to nature by the route of Professor Stickems or Madam Cheatems.

Or else, poor souls, they are taking courses of high-priced lectures on European travel from a lady who has never been any farther away from home laum Yonkers, or parliamentary drills from a sister who doesn’t know a caucus from a quorum when it gets outside of a book and into action. It would be very, very sad if these women were really following after false prophets, and spending their husbands’ good money on little tin gods in which they really believed. But they are not really taken in. They are simply amusing themselves by pretending to believe, and when any time of stress comes, when they come to die or get sick, you will find that they send off for their own priest or preacher, and then in a hurry call for the kind of doctors and pills on which they have been raised. In the meantime they have had the pleasure of being swindled by one who did the job scientifically and threw in with it a philosophic or religious or literary flavour, and they consider that it was worth the price. <s><»> <S> Falling in Love. (By Hubert Bland.) There is a deep significance —one might almost.say a fatal significance—in the phrase. It would seem to imply a certain involuntariness, a certain suddenness, a certain unexpectedness. One does not, as a rule, fall, if one can help oneself; and the effects of a fall are not, tfor the most part, conducive to equanimity. Love, if you come to think of it is the only thing in his life into which a man does fall and not lose his dignity or suffer injury to his amour propre. He never speaks of falling into a fortune, for instance, or into Parliament. Common phrases are the expressions oi the common experience, of the common consciousness. That is why they are. so pregnant of meaning, why they go so straight to the mark. When the average man pauses to reflect he usually blunders in his speech; but when he merely exclaims, as it were, bursts forth spontaneously, he is nearly always right. As Monsieur Jourdain talked prose, so the average man talks good commonsense, without knowing it. So when he feels the first overwhelming, irresistible impulse of passion, he expresses that feeling of his in the universal formula. He “falls” in love. “Falls,” mark you. Not walks, or strolls, or even runs, but falls. He is the victim of accident that is, for no man ever falls of set design. Cabinet Ministers are said to “ride for a fall,” but the rest of us try always to keep in stable equilibrium. And so in our everyday speech, you see, we recognise that in what is not seldom the most important event of our lives we are the children of chance. And so, indeed, it is. Thought, prudence, deliberation, have naught to do with it. Not even our existing ideals and predilections shall avail us when the catastrophic moment arrives. The woman of our dreams may Im»— A daughter of the go<ls divinely tall And most divinely fair,

and we go to a garden party, or to another fellow’s wedding, or (though this is rare) to a progressive bridge drive, and come away our heart full to bursting with the recollection of four feet eleven and a-half inches of darkskinned femininity, with raven black hair and eyes like sloes. WHAT CAN HE SEE IN HER! Our mothers ami sisters wonder “what he can see in her," he who always liked woman long and willowy, and golden as ripe corn. Our brother has been told that she has the deuce and all of a temper, and a grandfather who always dines in his shirt-sleeves; but she is all the world to us, her smile our heaven, her frown our hell. For we have fallen in love, you see. Had but a moment been given us for reflection, we had remained true to our preference. A scientific French gentleman professes to have discovered that love, the sort of love into which men fall, is a physiological condition, a morbid condition, a pathological condition induced by a microbe, and really when one comes to consider the symptoms one does feel that that scientific French gentleman has something to say for himself. That microbe, it is true, has not yet been caught, cultivated in a proper medium, made to wiggle-waggle under a microscope, and exhibited by a magic lantern for all to see. But then, neither has the microbe of influenza.

Microbes, we are told, are all aliout us at all times; we breathe them in with every breath we draw, and it is our condition alone which decides whether they shall lay hold on us or not. When the influenza microbe is about, we are further told upon authority we should avoid close and heated places, such as theatres, concert halls, and crowds of all sorts, and should refrain from doing things, such as getting wet feet, which predispose to the infection. Surely the same kind of instructions might with profit be given us for the avoidance of the microbe of love. Dances, for example, and above all, shadowed corners at dances, are the little beast’s favourite habitat. And the act of dancing itself would seem to predispose the constitution in a quite remarkable way. THE WORLD’S ONE WOMAN. Given the condition favourable and the thing—the fall, 1 mean—is certain to happen. It is the subjective—not the objective—factor which matters. You fall in love with Ethel, and you go home hugging yourself with the reflection that of all earth’s countless millions of maidens Ethel has been reserved by an omnipotent and kindly Providence for you. For you “the world's one woman” is Ethel, she and no other. In point of fact, it had been just the same had it been Gladys, or any other young woman, “differing," as Carlyle says, “from any two million other young women not perceptibly.” You have fallen in love, not because you have happened to r meet Miss This or Miss That, but because the microbe had got you in its grip before the meeting took place. The vertigo, the rapture, the yeasty state of the emotions are the essentials of the affair; the particular occasion, the particular person, were accidents merely.

Other disease give immunity. Love, like influenza, gives none. To have passed once or a thousand times (though a thousand would be excessive) is no security against its recurrence. Indeed, the more often one is scorched, the more liable to scorching does one become. Still, it lias its consolations, it is glorious while it lasts, and he who is always falling in love may bo contemptible in the eyes of the frigid, but he is the most enviable of men. TWO BEST THINGS IN THE WORLD. Theophile Gautier was very young, but he was also very wise, when he wrote

in “Mademoiselle de Maupin" that the two nicest things one can whisper to oneself when one wakes up in the morning are “J’ai de I’argent” and “Je suis amour eux.” It is not given to many of the sons of men to be able to say truly the first, but almost any fool, with a little eare, can manage the second.

Like other and less romantic forms of intoxication, it affects different men in different ways. Some wax garrulous; others secretive, but all (I feel pretty certain of this) write, or try to write, poetry. If I were a young woman £ would never marry a young man who had not done something resembling, however faintly, a sonnet in the first week of in-loveness. Of course, the lady’s name sometimes presents difficulties. I once went nearly mad for two whole days and nights in trying to find a rhyme for Susan. It was not until the cold dawn of the third day that it occurred to me that the adored name might be inserted in the middle of a line and not necessarily at the end of it. Then reason ceased to roek ujxm her throne. But Susan is an uncommonly awkward word to work in any way. Of all feminine names, give me Lily for choice. You "can do almost anything with Lily. You see you can talk about gardens and altars, not to mention purity and grace. I have said that falling in love takes different men in different ways; but it is lucky for the human race and its sense of dignity that it doesn’t take many men, as it took, on his own admission, the late Mr. William Morris, the poet. Says he of his sensations immediately' after the fall: — For me, I choke and grow quite faint to see My lady moving graciously. It must be really horrible, almost to choke every time the girl crosses the room or uses her handkerchief! THE OTHER SIDE: FALLING OUT. This is an article on falling in love, and not on falling out of it, and so I d® not feel called upon to say over much on the latter dismal and depressing subject. I may, perhaps, however, be permitted to mention just a few of the symptoms. By the way, though, one never does fall out of love—the decline is never quite so sudden as that—one slides out of it, so to speak. You begin by finding it just the least little bit in the world of a nuisance to have to write that daily letter. You feel that all the nice things have been said that there is nothing for it but to repeat yourself, and against repetition your artistic soul rises in revolt. Or perhaps just at the very first you don't go quite so far as that. It is going out to post the letter that is a bore; for the pillar box is half a mile away, the night is cold, the road is sloshy, and you have on indoor shoes. Then, a little later on, you find it easier to say good-bye than you did three weeks ago, and then —but I will not write on falling out of love, I would rather, far rather, dissertate on graves and epitaphs, even on worms. And yet, after all, it should l>e no such serious subject of lamentation; for it is idle, and worse than that, to bewail the inevitable. A fall, unless indeed it be fatal, implies a recovery. Men continue to love, no doubt, but no man continues in love. And as you drift out you have at least the inspiring consolation that you will in all probability fall in again before you know where you are. Poets, dramatists, novelists do rightly to make this falling in love the universal theme of their art; for it is the universal theme of life. That fall awaits you, perhaps, round tne next corner, be you who you may; and neither age, nor inborn wisdom, nor hardly achieved experience shall save you when your time is coine. Petition the gods, therefore, that you* fall be soft.