to have any occasion for a boast. She must avoid
every circumstance which would allow a feminine rival an opportunity
for a sneer. She must be able to give and take cheerfully, to conceal
every social wound and slight, and to be deaf to every disagreeable
thing. In short, she must be armed at every point, and never lay down
her arms, and never be off watch. It is therefore a position whose
requirements, if translated into active business life, would employ
the utmost resources of a fertile and energetic man.

And what are the general results of talents so varied and so
industriously employed? As a usual thing, the gentlemen's favorite
dances and flirts her way from a brilliant girlhood to a fretful,
neglected _femme passee_. She has in the meantime had the mortification
of seeing the plain girls whom she despised become honored wives and
mothers, and possibly leaders in that set of the social world of which
she still makes one of the rank and file of spinsterhood. Her
disappointments, in spite of her careful concealment of them, tell
upon her physique. She sees the waning of her power, and the
approaches of that winter of discontent which wasted opportunities are
sure to bring.

Spurred with a sense of haste by some unhappy slight, she perhaps
unadvisedly marries a man who ten years previously would not have
ventured to clasp her shoe-buckle. If he happens to possess a firm
will and a strong character, he will try to pull her sharply up to his
mark, and there will be endless frictions and reprisals, with all
their possible results. If he is some old lover, weak in purpose,
fatuous and brainless in his admiration, then the foolish flirting
virgin will likely become a foolish flirting wife; and a miserable
complaisance will bring forth its natural outgrowth of contempt and
dislike, and perhaps culminate in some flagrant social misdemeanor.

To be a favorite with men is not, then, a desirable honor for any
woman. They will admire her loveliness, sun themselves in her smiles,
and catch a little ephemeral pleasure and glory in her favor; but they
will not marry her. And the reason, though not very evident to a
thoughtless girl, is at least a very real and powerful one. It is
because such a girl _never touches them on their best side_, and never
reveals in herself that womanly nature which a man knows instinctively
is the foundation of wifely value,--that nature which expresses itself
in service for love's sake, as a very