n spend the rest of your life
wishing you hadn't.)
Then, when she has the points of the compass, so to speak, she says
she will help her dear friend, and the dear friend, not being clever
(or she wouldn't have confided), thinks she is the loveliest girl in
the world, and, after promising to send her lover to call in order to
be "helped," she calmly goes to sleep, just as if she has not seen the
beginning of the end.
The other girl has observed--and she is, of course, pretty and
attractive. Girls who do not know anything and who never study are
always pretty. It is only the plain girl who is obliged to be clever.
The first time she sees the lover of her dear friend she begins to
laud her to the sky. She herself is looking so pretty, and she shows
off in the most favorable light, while all the time singing her dear
friend's praise with such fatal persistency that she fairly makes him
sick of the sound of her name and of her namby-pamby virtues. Now the
man would hardly be human if he did not tell this artless little
creature that he had had enough of her dear friend, and that he would
much prefer to talk about herself. Pouts of hurt surprise. She
"thought you were such a friend of hers!" She "only wanted to
entertain you by the only subject" she "thought would interest you."
Presto! The entering wedge! She knows it, but the man does not. He has
no idea of being disloyal to his sweetheart, but he is a lost man
nevertheless--lost to the first girl and won by the second. Won in a
perfectly harmless and legitimate way too. Won while doing her duty,
keeping her promise, helping her friend. Her conscience acquits her.
She has only observed and made use of her cleverness to know that too
smooth and easy a course to true love generally gives him to the other
girl.
But in reality she has stolen him--she has committed a real theft.
And, personally, I should prefer to know her had she stolen money. You
can jail a man who steals your watch, but the girl who steals a man's
heart away from his sweetheart walks free, and uncondemned even--to
their shame be it spoken--by those who know what she has done.
Nobody dares condemn her--even the friends of the robbed girl, for
that presupposes some lack in her charm, and gives publicity to her
loss. The wronged girl, because of her pride and conventionality and
civilization, makes no outcry. A barbarian in her place would have
fallen on the robber girl in a fury and scratched her eyes
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