years back was wont to make his offer on his knees. He
also haunted the home of the beloved maiden, deeming himself well repaid
for five hours wait if he had a fleeting glimpse of her at the window.
Torn hair was frequent, and refusal drove men to suicide and madness.

The young women who were the cause of all this trouble were never more
than eighteen or twenty years of age. Mature spinsters of twenty-five
figured as envious deterrents in the happy affair. Many a story-book
marriage has been spoiled by the jealousy of the wrinkled rival of
twenty-five.

[Sidenote: The First Proposal]

The violent protestations of the lover in the novel were indeed
something to be awaited with fear and trembling. With her anticipations
aroused by this kind of reading and her eagerness whetted by
interminable years of waiting, Mademoiselle receives her first offer of
marriage.

She is in doubt, at first, as to whether it is a proposal. It seems like
some dreadful mistake. Where is the courtly manner of the lover in the
book? What is the matter with this red-faced boy? Where is the pretty
pleading, the gracious speech? Why should a lover stammer and confuse
his verbs?

Mademoiselle recoils in disgust. This, then, is what she has been
waiting for. It is not at all like the book. Her lover is entirely
different from other girls' lovers--so different that he is pathetic.

Her faith in the gospel of romance is sadly shaken, when the next
experience is a great deal like the first. No one, in the book, could
doubt the lover's meaning. Yet in the halting sentences and confused
metaphors of actual experience, there is sometimes much question as to
what he really means. A girl often has to ask a man if he has just
proposed to her, that she may accept or refuse, in a gracious and proper
way.

[Sidenote: The Ordeal]

In a girl's early ideas on the subject, she has much sympathy for the
man who has to undergo the ordeal of asking a woman to be his wife. She
thinks he must contemplate the momentous step for weeks, await the
opportunity with expectant terror, and when his lady is in a happy mood,
recite with fear and trembling, the proposal which he has written out
and learned, appropriately enough, by heart.

Later, she comes to know that after the first few times, men propose as
thoughtlessly and easily as they dress for dinner, that they devote no
particular study to the art, that constant practice makes them
proficient, and that almost