erely a flirtation
with the emoluments which accompany a promise to marry, those emoluments
are not nice things for a subsequent and avowed lover, whether masculine
or feminine, to think upon. Lastly,

A laxity with regard to the claims of courtship is apt to breed a laxity
with regard to the claims of wedlock. In short,

Flirtations, like clandestine engagements, are an affront to love.
Accordingly

To the engagement-ring should be as attached as much importance as to the
wedding-ring. Indeed,

A difficult and a delicate path it is that a girl has to tread through
life--and often enough a dangerous. Yet with extraordinary deftness she
treads it. She must win her a mate, yet has to pretend that the mate
wins her. She makes believe to be captured, yet has herself to be intent
on the chase. To be wooed and wedded is the law of her being, yet not
for one moment dares she to exhibit too great an alacrity to obey that
law; for she knows instinctively that an easy victory prognosticates a
fickle victor. Is she abundantly endowed with the very attributes that
make for wife-and mother-hood, a strong and swaying passion and an
affection unbounded, she must hold them in leash with exemplary patience;
for, alas! Are they given the rein for a single passing moment, instead
of being accounted unto her for righteousness, they work her ruin. She
must win her one man, and she must win him for life; but she cannot pick
or choose, for she must wait to be asked.

If she make test of many admirers, she is described as a flirt; if,
conscientious and demure, she await her fate, a desirable fate is by no
means assured.

In truth it seems that too often a girl must dissemble--hateful as
dissemblance in men. T'is a hard road indeed that a girl has to travel.
To win her a fellow-farer for life, she must go out of her way to
accommodate so many travelers: and this one is lured by this, and that
one by that, and another by something unnoticed by the throng. But, an
she dissembles one iota too much, her fellow-farers look askance, and he
who eventually joins her for good upbraids her for that by which she won.

Dissemblance is indeed at once the boon and the bane of a girl: without
it, she thinks to be overlooked (often enough a preposterous assumption);
with it, she is looked upon too much. And always,

Always a girl has to pretend that never did she descend to dissemblance.
--Which, nevertheless, is sometimes absolutely true