money, how he spends it, how he lends it,
borrows it, or saves it, we have a perfect measurement for his temper
and capabilities. And if we know how a woman deals with her letters,
how many she gets, how many she sends, how long or how short they are,
if they are sprawly and untidy, or neat and cleanly, and how they are
signed and sealed, then we can judge her nature very fairly, for she
has written herself down in an open book, and all who wish may read
her.

Flirts and Flirtation

Flirting is the product of a highly civilized state of society.
People in savage, or even illiterate life have no conception of
its delicate and indefinable diplomacy. A savage sees a woman "that
pleases him well," pays the necessary price for her, and is done with
the affair. Jane in the kitchen and John in the field look and
love, tell each other the reason why, and get married. "Keeping
company," which is their nearest approach to flirtation, has a
definite and well-understood end in view, the approaches to which are
unequivocal and admit of no other translation.

Flirts are of many kinds. There is the quiet, "still-water" flirt, who
leads her captives by tender little sighs and pretty, humble,
beseeching ways; who hangs on every word a man says, asks his advice,
his advice only, because it is so much better than any one else's.
That is her form of the art, and a very effective one it is.

Again, the flirt is demonstrative and daring. She tempts, dazzles,
tantalizes her victims by the very boldness with which she approaches
that narrow but deep Rubicon dividing flirting from indiscretion. But
she seldom crosses it; up to a certain point she advances without
hesitation, but at once there is a dead halt, and the flirtee finds
that he has been taken a fool's journey.

There are sentimental flirts, sly little pusses, full of sweet
confidences and small secrets, and who delight in asking the most
suggestive and seductive questions. "Does Willy really believe in love
marriages?" or, "Is it better to have loved and lost than never to
have loved at all?" etc.

Intellectual flirts hover about young poets and writers, or haunt
studios and libraries, and doubtless are delightfully distracting to
the young ideas shooting in those places.

Everybody knows a variety of the religious flirt,--those demure lilies
of the ecclesiastical garden, that grow in the pleasant paths where
pious young rectors and eligible saints walk. Perhaps, as t