Kitabı oku: «Her Royal Highness Woman», sayfa 13
CHAPTER XLV
CUPIDIANA
Stray thoughts on women, love and matrimony
Few lovers are sure of each other. If you doubt it, listen to what they say, and you will constantly hear them repeat: 'Do you love me?' 'Will you always love me?' or 'How long will you love me?' They will often wake each other in the night to repeat these questions.
Men should cease to be jealous when they discover that they have real ground for being jealous. I do not believe that jealousy comes from true love; but justifiable jealousy should cure one of love.
Love sanctifies everything. Men and women, who really love each other and are faithful, are virtuous.
If you love a woman from the depths of your heart and soul, no words can be found adequate to convey an idea of it.
You cannot blame a man or a woman for being in love any more than you can blame them for having the toothache. If the love they feel is a misfortune to them, or the cause of unhappiness to others, pity them all.
Friendship is the old age of love. Happy the husband and wife who, when the days of love and passion are gone, find real happiness and blessed rest in friendship.
There should be no other law than love to bind a man and a woman together. The day they cease to love each other should be the day on which the contract determines, and they become friends.
The intelligent, artistic, refined man is a gourmet in love; the foolish and brutal man is a gourmand.
Men in old age often give young ones salutary advice as a consolation for being unable to give them bad example.
However ill you may speak or think of women, you will always find a woman able to do it better than you.
Why are women far less indulgent than men for the faults of women?
If I were a beautiful woman, oh, how I should hate women!
The woman who has never succumbed to temptation, often because temptation has never been in her way, is inexorable for the weaknesses of her sex.
Nine times out of ten the ugly woman will at once accept as reliably true any gossip she hears on the subject of a beautiful woman. She draws herself up and thinks: 'No one could ever say such things of me.' And she is right: no one would who did not wish to be grossly flattering.
Only the woman who has yielded to temptation is charitable, and will help the fallen angel. Like Dido, she says:
'Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco.'
It is because I love and revere woman that I pity the fallen one, and cannot say an unkind word of her.
I think that men should go down on their knees before the fallen women, and implore their pardon, in the name of their sex, for the injury – the criminal, irretrievable injury – that has been done to them by the curs and scoundrels who are the cause of their present condition.
A woman is a wretched coward who, having had, in succession, the protection of a father and of a husband, does not pity and help, if she can, the beautiful, unprotected girl who has tried to fight the battle of life by herself, and has been wounded.
Woman is an angel who seldom appreciates a man who has not a bit of the devil in him.
The most religious woman will postpone an interview with her Maker for an appointment with her dressmaker.
Matrimony is like any other contract: an agreement signed by two honourable persons, each of whom, in every clause, takes the other to be a dishonourable one.
A loving woman will keep her heart warm as long as she lives, and her hair black as long as she dyes.
Woman is an instrument given to man for his happiness and his delight. If the instrument gets neglected, out of tune, and broken, man should blame himself alone. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the instrument is right enough; it only wants to be in good and careful keeping.
There are only two places in the world where a beautiful woman, fashionably dressed, can walk comfortably without being stared at by the women like a Barnum's freak out for an airing – Paris and New York, and perhaps Bond Street, London, during the season. Everywhere else she has to ride or hide. There is only one spot of the earth where such a woman can go about in all freedom and security without running the risk of being followed and otherwise annoyed by idle men, and that is Fifth Avenue, New York.
In matrimony, to retain happiness and make it last to the end, it is not a question for a woman to remain beautiful, it is a question for her to remain interesting. Not the slightest detail should be beneath her notice in order to keep alive the attention of her husband.
Love feeds on illusions, lives on trifles. If a man loves his wife, a rose on her head, her hair parted the other way, a newly-trimmed bonnet, may revive in him the interest he felt the first time he met her, nay, the emotion he felt the first time he held her in his arms. The very best dishes may become insipid if served with the eternally same sauce.
There comes a time when a woman has to make up her mind to choose between being called a 'dear old soul' or a 'crabby old thing.'
I love and admire the woman of forty who admits that she is ten years older than her daughter, the woman of fifty who is proud to show me her grandchildren, and does not object to being photographed with them, and the woman of sixty who does not expect me to admire her shoulders at a dinner-party.
Painting, music, and women are often admired or criticised by plucky people who are not afraid of exhibiting their ignorance.
Women are born mothers or sweethearts. When they marry, they become mother-wives and take their children into first consideration, or sweetheart-wives, and bestow their best care and attentions on their husbands. But for the former ones, many clubs would have to put up their shutters.
A woman who is constantly blushing must be terribly well informed.
As long as it is man who proposes, matrimony will be promotion for a woman.
The woman taken in adultery was formerly burned or stoned to death; later on she was condemned to three months' imprisonment. Nowadays she goes scot-free, and her husband is turned into ridicule. What more does she want? – the Victoria Cross or the Legion of Honour?
There is no esprit de corps among women.
America is the only country where you hear women speak well of their sex. It speaks volumes for them, and it enables American men to be polite and even gallant, and do the same.
Woman is made to love and to be loved. She may live on love and die of it. For a man, love is the occupation of a few moments; for a woman, love is the occupation of a lifetime.
If a man hears men speak ill of women, he should, before joining in the chorus, remember his mother. Then he will be sure to take their defence.
Women should have two great aims in life: trying to be beautiful and succeeding in being pleasant.
Whether I think of woman as a grandmother, a mother, a wife, a sweetheart, or even a little girl who, by-and-by, will bear all these titles in succession, I believe that men ought to spend most of their spare time in strewing with flowers the ground upon which a woman is about to tread.
There are men who complain that roses have thorns. They should be grateful to know that thorns have roses.
The roses of life are the women.
