"A Guide to Men" by Helen Rowland - 08 - Widows (Improvisations)

WIDOWS A WIDOW is a fascinating being with the flavor of maturity, the spice of experience, the piquancy of novelty, the tang of practiced coquetry, and the halo of one man's approval. Second mourning is that interesting period, at which a widow continues to weep with one eye while she begins to flirt with the other. When a widow comes in at the door, a debutante's chances fly out of the window. No matter how many wrinkles a widow may have in her face, she always has enough at her fingertips to offset them. Even a dead husband gives a widow some advantage over a spinster; the very debts her husband left afford her something to boast about to the unmarried woman who has only her own board bills to pay. A girl takes a man for better or for worse-but a widow merely takes him for granted.[82] Girls are the milk and honey which sweeten a man's life; widows, the caviare and wine which relieve its flatness and give it spice and piquancy. A girl knows exactly what kind of man she wants to marry; but a widow knows all the kinds she doesn't want to marry, and usually makes a safe selection by the wise process of elimination. A widow's chief consolation in remarrying is probably that she finds it less exhausting to sit up and wait for one man to come home evenings, than to sit up and wait for a lot of them to go home. Widows have all the honor and glory without any of the trials of matrimony; a live husband may be a necessity, but a dead one is a luxury. Matrimony is the price of love-widowhood, the rebate. IMPROVISATIONS SPRING flowers are like spring love, so sweet and tender, but doomed to fade quickly; it's in the autumn of life, or of the year, that we get the hardy variety of either. A man may honestly admire a superior woman; but when it comes to marrying, he usually looks about for something far enough beneath him to enjoy being ordered about and patted on the head. A girl's heart is like her dressing-table-crowded with tenderly cherished little souvenirs of love; a man's, like his pipe, is carefully cleaned and emptied after each flame has gone out. A man doesn't ask a girl to "name the day" any more; he merely pleads guilty to loving her and then closes his eyes while she passes sentence on him and decide when he shall begin "serving time." When a woman reforms she bleaches her conscience down to the roots as she does her hair; a man simply gives his a coat of whitewashing so that he will have a nice, clean space in which to begin all over again.[84] When a bachelor sniffs through his letters before opening them in the morning, it is not a sign that he is looking for dynamite, but that he is looking for a note bearing a brand of sachet which he has mistaken for some girl's "sweet personality." At the awakening from love's young dream the woman's first thought is, "How can I break his heart?" The man's, "How can I break away?" A man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through her imagination, and then they both speak of it as an affair of "the heart." No, Clarice, a man's idea of being loved isn't exactly being followed around with a hot water bottle, a box of pills and the eternal question: "Do you love me as much as ever?" One grass widow doesn't make a summer resort-but she can always make it interesting. When a man has baggy trousers nowadays it is from falling on his knees to an automobile-not to a girl.[85] A black lie always shows up against the dazzling background of truth; it's all the little white ones a man keeps telling you that can't be spotted or distinguished from the rest of his conversation. The only time when a sense of humor profits a woman anything is when she can laugh at herself for having tried to charm a man by dazzling him with it. Most men fall in love with a sudden jolt, and wake up to find that they are married to an "impulse." It's a lame love that has to be carried through the honeymoon in a three-thousand-dollar touring car. In the mathematics of a bachelor one kiss makes a flirtation, two kisses make one conquest, three kisses make a love-affair and four kisses make one tired. There are "chain-smokers" who light one cigarette from the dying end of another-and there are also "chain lovers" who light one flame from the dying embers of another.[86] Eve had one advantage over all the rest of her sex. In his wildest moments of rage Adam never could accuse her of being "just like her mother!" Every woman has a different notion of an ideal husband; but every woman's ideal lover is the same impossible combination of saint and devil, brute and baby, hero and mollycoddle, that never is seen anywhere off the stage or outside the pages of a "best thriller." Love is a voyage of discovery, marriage the goal-and divorce the relief expedition. A man never can comprehend why a woman can't understand how he can be dead in love with one girl and acutely alive to the charms of a lot of others at the same time. Jealousy is the tie that binds-and binds-and binds. It is not the fear of being shipwrecked that keeps a bachelor from embarking on the sea of matrimony; it is the awful horror of being becalmed.[87] Nowadays most women grow old gracefully; most men, disgracefully. A man can forgive a woman for having made a fool of herself over any man on earth-except himself. Eternity: The interval between the time when a woman discovers that a man is in love with her and the time when he finds it out himself and tells her about it. The follies which a man regrets the most, in his life, are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity. In the average man's opinion the command, "Thou shalt not steal," does not apply to a kiss, a heart, an umbrella, an hotel or an after-dinner story. To a woman the first kiss is just the end of the beginning; to a man, it is the beginning of the end. The qualities a man seeks in a bride no more resemble those he will want in a wife than a cabaret rag-ditty resembles a lullaby, but two years ahead is farther than any man can see when he is looking into a pretty girl's eyes.