LVI
DANGEROUS GIRLS
Chief among the women from whom a young man should pray his guardian angel to deliver him is the Hinting Girl. She is a gentle grafter who holds up every man she meets with a pair of innocent-looking blue eyes that bid him stand and deliver just as effectually and efficiently as if he were looking down the barrels of a couple of blue-nosed revolvers in the hands of a highway robber. You will find these cheerful workers, son, where you least expect them. The very highest society is filled with girls of undisputed position and unquestioned morals, who ruthlessly plunder every man they meet, and you will never encounter an individual more to be feared than these bandits of the parlor.
Did you ever wonder why one girl receives so many more presents than another, and why every man who passes lays some offering on her shrine? Take it from me, this is the result of science and not mere chance. Observe, closely, and you will see, when you call, that she steers the conversation artfully around to the latest play, and before you know it you have offered to take her to it.
Also, she has let you know that violets are her favorite flower, and the date of her birthday. Before Christmas she artlessly confides in you where there is the jeweled vanity, or the hand-painted fan, that she has set her heart upon, and she couldn’t shout it at you any plainer if she bawled it to you through a megaphone that she expects you to come across, and will think you a piker if you don’t.
Beware the Hinting Girl, son. She is the woman who is accessory before the crime of half of the embezzlements of trusted clerks who go wrong, and who, if she got her deserts, would stand in the prisoners’ dock by the side of the poor, weak, trembling boy who has stolen to buy her jewels or to give her a good time. And she makes the sort of wife whose husband rises up and sits down to a never-ending chant of “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!”
Then there’s the Girl With a Past. Very often she has been more sinned against than sinning. Probably her morals are just as good as your own, son; but, even so, such marriages rarely turn out happily. For we have to face the naked fact that, while a man may love a woman well enough to forget and forgive her indiscretions, society, which is not in love with her, remembers them all. And it reminds her husband that it recalls them. The man who marries a Woman With a Past is pretty much in the same fix as the man who hires a reformed embezzler to be his cashier. He hopes he will run straight, but he keeps an eye on the cash box—a situation which doesn’t make for domestic felicity. Of course, there are women who reform and gather in their wild oats crops and ever after raise nothing but garden truck around their doorstep, but even while their husbands are devouring their domestic cabbages and onions there rarely comes a family spat in which they do not throw in their wives’ teeth the kind of farmers they have been. The truth is that it takes a big man and woman to defy the conventions. That is what makes it safest for those of us who are little people to play the game according to the rules laid down by Hoyle. And one of these rules is that women must keep their skirts clean. By and large it is a good rule, son, for it means the purity of race, the integrity of society and a lot of other things that keep this old world going.
Then there’s the Weeping Girl. Whenever you meet with a gentle, sweet, soft, babyish-looking little girl, with a chin that trembles and big eyes that overflow with tears at the slightest provocation, and who can cry without her nose getting red, fly, son, fly. She will fasten herself upon you, and when you try to make a getaway she will cling to you and weep. And no man can behold unmoved a woman crying for him, because he is such a good thing. You will stop to wipe her eyes; and all will be over with you except the long, long years of rainy matrimony when you will have to deal with a wife who cannot be reasoned with or cajoled or coerced into doing anything she doesn’t want to do, because you will be so afraid of starting another freshet of tears.
Then there’s the Domestic Girl, who baits her hook with angels’ food. You might go farther and do worse than marry the Domestic Girl, for while romance is transient one’s appetite remains, and after one’s illusions are gone it is a comfortable thing to have a good dinner to fall back upon. Still, one must confess, the Domestic Girl is apt to have only a bread-and-butter conversation, of which a man might tire in time; so, unless your stomach is developed in excess of your heart, walk warily when the Domestic Girl begins to inveigle you into little meals for two that she cooks for you under a pink-shaded lamp.
Lastly, there is the girl who is just near you—the girl you work with, or who lives in the same boarding house with you, or who comes to visit your sister. Men who have escaped the dangers of all other women are the victims of propinquity which unites them to ladies they couldn’t otherwise have seen through a telescope. Somehow our very nearness to the people with whom we are thrown every day keeps us from getting a perspective on their faults and disabilities, and habit deceives us into thinking that they are more necessary to us than they are. And so we drift into the mismated marriages that keep the divorce courts busy and the world salted down with the brine of our tears.
Therefore, if you perceive that Mamie, whom you thought vulgar at first, no longer gets on your nerves; if you observe that Sadie, who bored you when you first met her, is beginning to interest you with her chatter about what “he said” and “I said,” and you discover that you have quit being shocked by Carrie’s gum-chewing and Mabel’s grammar, then, son, pack your trunk and leave while the leaving is good. Otherwise, the Girl Next to You will get you sure.
But why amplify the list? Some day a girl will tag you, and you will know you are “it,” and a million warnings could not save you from your fate.