to win anything.
His cheap little accomplishments of singing--badly--possibly even of
reciting dialect with realistic effects, he is accustomed to say he
"just picked up." I often have thought that he must have picked them
up after somebody else had thrown them away. But they have been
efficacious in his town, and in a larger field, with foemen more
worthy of his steel, they are intended to enslave.

The irresistible man is too pitiful to laugh at with any degree of
comfort. The pathos of the situation is almost too apparent. That is
one reason why he is allowed to go on as he is. It is why no one has
the heart to try to correct him. What _can_ you say to a man whose
confidence in his power to please you is such that at parting he says:
"I cannot spare you another evening this week, but I'll come next
Thursday if I can. Don't expect me, however, until I let you know, and
don't be disappointed if you find that I can't come, after all."

To be sure, you have not asked him to repeat his visit at all. To be
sure, you have nearly died during this call which is just over. But
what are you going to do? We have a white bulldog whose confident
attitude towards the world is quite like that of the irresistible man.
Jack blunders in where nobody wants him, and puts his great, heavy paw
on our best gowns, and scratches at the door when we want to sleep,
and gets under our feet when we are trying to catch a train, and makes
a nuisance of himself generally. But he is so sure that we love him
that we haven't the heart to turn him out-of-doors. We simply endure
him, because he is a dumb brute who is so used to being petted that
everybody tolerates him, and nobody tries to improve him or teach him
better manners.

Confidence is a beautiful thing. But it is also one of the most
delicate of attributes, and requires the daintiest handling. The man
who is confident with women must be very sure of a personal magnetism,
or of sufficient merit to insure success, otherwise his confidence
will prove the flattest of failures. The only difference between the
irresistible man who bores us to death and the successful man who is
so fascinating that he cannot come too often, is that one has
confidence with nothing to base it on, and the other bases his
confidence on fact.

Women are not looking for flaws in men. They are only too anxious to
make the best of sorry specimens, and shut their eyes to faults, and
to coax virtues into prominence. Men h