before he is
ten years old. It's his ingrain attitude toward women and he begins by
practicing it on his mother. If he is not to the manner born and tries
to cultivate it late in life, he must watch very carefully to see that
he does not overdo it like a lackey or a dancing master or the villain
in a melodrama. Of course, it can be cultivated to a certain extent,
like music or Christian Science, but it's hard for a man to learn that a
woman is a fragile creature and needs a bodyguard, after he has been
twenty years letting his sisters pack their own trunks and lug their own
satchels and golf clubs. Besides, most men are too busy or too
self-absorbed to cultivate it, if they could."

"Most men," remarked the bachelor, stirring his coffee and lighting his
cigarette, "aren't anxious to become the sort of 'mother's darling' you
describe."

"Nonsense," retorted the widow. "Richard the Third was a perfectly
adorable ladies' man and he couldn't be called exactly--a 'mother's
darling.' Yet the things he said to poor Lady Anne and the way he said
them would have turned any feminine brain. It isn't milk and water that
women admire; it's the milk of human interest. It's the feeling that a
man is gazing at you instead of through you at his own reflection--or
some other woman."

"But if it means giving up all the easy chairs," protested the bachelor,
"and packing all the family trunks and putting out your pipe every time
a female member of the family approaches and eating dishes you don't
want and running round doing household errands, a man hasn't got
time----"

"It doesn't!" declared the widow. "It has nothing to do with morals or
with selfishness. Some of the most selfish men in the world are those
whom a poor little woman will work her fingers to the bone to support,
simply because when she comes home at night after her labors her husband
puts his arms around her and tells her how sad it makes him feel to see
her struggle so, and how young and beautiful she keeps in spite of it
all and orders her to lie down and let him run out and fetch her some
ice cream and read to her. A man with that sort of way with him can get
anything on earth out of a woman and then make her eternally grateful to
him. Look at the husbands who slave all day earning money for their
wives to spend and go home tired out and grouchy and never get a word of
thanks. Yet, a man can stay out six nights in the week, and if he will
come home on the seventh wi