use of a conventional fear of
slipping up somewhere. There was a nice Red Cross major in France who
had had no instruction in military matters, and had no arrogance
whatever. So he used to salute all the privates and the M. P.'s before
they had a chance. He was usually asking the road to somewhere or other,
and they would stand staring after him thoughtfully until he was quite
out of sight.

And as a corollary to this conventionality, how wretched men are when
they are placed in false positions! Nobody likes it, of course, but a
woman can generally get out of it. Men think straighter than women, but
not so fast. I dined one night on shipboard with the captain of the
transport on which I came back from France, and there was an army
chaplain at the table. So, as chaplains frequently say grace before
meat, I put a hand on the knee of a young male member of my family
beside me and kept it there, ready for a squeeze to admonish silence.
But the chaplain did not say grace, and the man on my right suddenly
turned out to be a perfectly strange general in a state of helpless
uneasiness. I have a suspicion that not even the absolute impeccability
of my subsequent conduct convinced him that I was not a designing woman.

But, although we are discussing men, as all women know, there are really
no men at all. There are grown-up boys, and middle-aged boys, and
elderly boys, and even sometimes very old boys. But the essential
difference is simply exterior. Your man is always a boy. He grows
tidier, and he gathers up a mass of heterogeneous information, and in
the strangest possible fashion as the years go on, boards have to be put
into the dining-room table, and the shoe bill becomes something
terrible, and during some of his peregrinations he feels rather like a
comet with a tail. The dentist's bills and where to go for the summer and
do-you-think-the-nurse-is-as-careful-as-she-should-be-with-baby's-bottles
make him put on a sort of surface maturity. But it never fools his
womankind. Deep down he still believes in Santa Claus, and would like to
get up at dawn on the Fourth of July and throw a firecracker through the
cook's window.

That is the reason women are natural monogamists. They know they have to
be one-man women, because the one man is so always a boy, and has to
have so much mothering and looking after. He has to be watched for fear
his hair gets too long, and sent to the tailor's now and then for
clothes. And if someone d