s an artist to scorn doing anything
save his best.

From little excursions to neighboring towns and country houses about
Warsaw, Chopin now ventured farther away from home, chaperoned by his
friend, Prince Radziwill. He visited Berlin, Venice, Prague, Heidelberg,
and mingled on an absolute equality with the nobility. If they had
titles, he had talents. And his talents often made their decorations
sing small.

His modesty was witching, and while in public concerts his playing was
not pronounced enough to capture the gallery, yet in small gatherings he
won all hearts, and the fact that he played his own compositions made
him an added object of enthusiasm to the elect. Chopin arrived in Paris
when he was twenty-two years of age. It was not his intention to remain
more than a few weeks, but Paris was to be his home for eighteen
years--and then Pere la Chaise.

* * * * *

A woman who beholds her thirtieth birthday in sight, and girlhood gone,
is approaching a climacteric in her career. Flaubert has named
twenty-nine as the eventful year in the life of woman, and thirty-three
for men. Every normal woman craves love and tenderness--these are her
God-given right. If they have not come to her by the time the bloom is
fading from her cheeks, there is danger of her reaching out and
clutching for them. The strongest instinct in young girls is
self-protection--they fight on the defensive. But at thirty, women have
been known to grow a trifle anxious, just as did the Sabine women who
dispatched a messenger to the Romans asking this question, "How soon
does the program begin?"

And thus are conditions reversed, for it is the youth of twenty or so
who seeks conquest with fiery soul. Alexander was only nineteen when he
sighed for more worlds to conquer. He didn't have to wait long before he
found that this one had conquered him. Youth considers itself immortal,
and its powers without limit, but as a man approaches thirty he grows
economical of his resources and parsimonious of his emotions. Men of
thirty, or so, are apt to be coy.

And so one might say that it is around thirty that for the first time
the man and the woman meet on an equality, without sham, shame or
pretense. Before that time the average woman abounds in affectation and
untruth; the man is absurdly aggressive and full of foolish flattery.

As to the question, "Should women propose?" the answer is, "Yes,
certainly, and they do when