delightful shock to discover it,
how far men ought to be encouraged to make love.

"Encourage them all you can, my dear. The best of men require all the
encouragement one is capable of giving them."

I pondered over that statement. From her point of view it was, of
course, perfectly proper. Married men need all the encouragement they
can get to keep them making love to their own wives. But from our
standpoint, of being girls--and very nice girls too, some of us, if I
do say it myself!--how far have we a right to encourage men to make
love to us?

Now I like men; and I like girls. So that I never want anybody to be
hurt at this very delicate and dangerous game of love-making. But
somebody always _is_ getting hurt, and although she never makes any
fuss about it, it is generally the girl.

There are two reasons for this. One is that love means twice--yes,
twenty, forty--times as much to a girl as to a man; and the second is
that we are a believing set of human geese, and we believe a great
deal of what you men say, which is wrong of us, and much more of what
your pronounced actions over us imply, which is worse. Girls are just
the same along the main lines of sentiment and hope and trust and
belief in men now as they ever were, and most of this talk about the
new woman being different is mere stuff and nonsense.

Now, the men come in right at this point and declare that we ought not
to believe so much; that until they have actually proposed marriage,
often they themselves do not know their own minds; that a man has a
perfect right to withdraw, _a la_ Hamlet, if he finds insurmountable
flaws in the girl's nature, or, what is oftener the case, somebody
whom he likes better; and they intimate pretty strongly that broken
hearts, or even slightly damaged affections, are largely our own
fault, which, from their standpoint, is true enough, and if we were
men we would all say so too.

But, looking at it from our standpoint, does it not seem as if the men
had all the rights on their side? And will they be as generous in this
as they are in everything else where we are concerned, and view the
matter from our point of view, with the sidelights turned on?

In the first place, there is practically the whole world of women
before men from which to choose. Think of that! Thousands of women,
and with the additional advantage of the right to make the first
advances! How many do _we_ have to choose from? We can't roam around
the wo