s active, were it not for "hints." But these are seldom
given in words--unless a man happens to be particularly stupid.

When the proposal habit is not firmly fastened upon a man, and he begins
to have serious designs upon some one girl, she knows it long before he
does. Incidentally, the family and the neighbours have their suspicions.

Woman, with her strong dramatic instinct, wishes the proposal to occur
according to accepted rules. Hence, if a man shows symptoms of
whispering the momentous question in a crowd, he is apt to be delicately
discouraged, and if the girl is not satisfied with her own appearance,
there will also be postponement. No girl wants to be proposed to when
her hair is dishevelled, her collar wilted, and her soul distraught by
pestiferous mosquitoes.

But an ambitious and painstaking girl will arrange the stage for a
proposal, with untiring patience, months before it actually happens.
When she practices assiduously all the morning, that she may execute
difficult passages with apparent ease in the evening, and willingly
turns the freezer that there may be cooling ice opportunely left after
dinner, to "melt if somebody doesn't eat it," she expects something to
happen.

When the man finally appears, and the little brother marches off like a
well-trained soldier, with two nickels jingling in his pocket, even the
victim might be on his guard. When the family are unceremoniously put
out of the house, and father, mother, and sisters are seen in the summer
twilight, wandering in disconsolate pairs, let the neighbours keep away
from the house under penalty of the girl's lasting hate.

Sometimes, when the family have been put out, and the common human
interest leads intimate spinster friends to pass the house, there is
nothing to be seen but the girl playing accompaniments for the man while
he sings.

Yet the initiated know, for if a girl only praises a man's singing
enough, he will most surely propose to her before many moons have
passed. The scheme has a two-fold purpose, because all may see that he
finds the house attractive, and if no engagement is announced, the
entire affair may easily be explained upon musical and platonic grounds.

[Sidenote: A Formal Proposal]

Owing to the distorted methods of courtship which prevail at the present
day, a girl may never be sure that a man really cares for her until he
makes a formal proposal. If a man were accepted the minute he proposed,
he would think th