ool.
Neither is he stupid. Very often he is a man of no small amount of
brain. He is, of course, always conceited, and generally, though not
always, handsome. I am not describing the soft, sapient, pretty man
who lisps, nor the weak-kneed young gentleman with pink cheeks who
sings tenor. Far worse. The irresistible man, as _we_ know him, is
often a man who is doing a man's work in the world, and doing it well.
He is frequently a man of character, but through that character runs
this strange, irritating thread of conceit, which blinds our eyes to
whatever of real worth may be within, because of his exasperatingly
confident exterior.

We should brush him aside as carelessly as if he were a fly should
there be nothing to him worth hating. But the maddening part of it to
us is that the irresistible man is worth saving, only he will not be
saved. He thinks he is perfect as he is. If he could get our point of
view and let some woman take a hand at him, she might efface his
irresistibleness and make a man of him. But no, the irresistible man
is in this world to give points--not take them.

A queer thing about this particular type of the irresistible man is
that he nearly always has grown up in a small town and has only come
to the city because his village got too small for his talents. That of
itself explains his whole attitude towards the world. Having probably
been the "show pupil" at school, having taken prizes and ranked first
among his fellows until he was twenty-one, he brings that confident
attitude with him and plants himself in the heart of the great city,
like Ajax defying the lightning, without the thought that changed
environments might demand change of conduct as well as change in
clothes.

Doubtless the whole town helped to spoil him. Doubtless he has heard
all his life that the town was too small for him, and that a man like
himself ought to go to the city, where there would be a market for his
talents. Doubtless he has conquered the hearts of all the village
maidens; therefore he expects the same arts to win among city girls.
This system of easy victory and of yearning for other worlds to
conquer, instead of making him fit himself capably for a larger field,
has, on account of this absurd fault of irresistibleness, only made
him superficial. His crudeness is, to the uninitiated, almost pitiful.
Having never been obliged to work for pre-eminence, he descries
exertion, and never admits that he has to try hard