The Widow [To Say Nothing of the Man]. Rowland Helen

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СКАЧАТЬ "She was the spice in life's pudding, the flavor, the sauce, the stimulant, the – "

      "This canoe is tipping dreadfully," remarked the widow, but the disapproval had disappeared from her eyes.

      "She was – "

      "Why, I do believe it's growing dark, Mr. Travers."

      "It is," agreed the bachelor. "Nobody can see – "

      "See – what?" asked the widow, suddenly sitting up straight and fixing the bachelor with her eyes.

      "How perfectly adorable and unfathomable and tumultuous – "

      "Are you feeding me sugar, Mr. Travers?"

      "Perhaps," acknowledged the bachelor, leaning back and picking up the paddle again, "but some day, when I'm ready, I'm going to stop feeding you sugar. I'm going to put on the curb bit."

      "Why don't you do it now – Billy?" asked the widow, with a challenging glance from beneath her lashes.

      "I can't," grumbled the bachelor, "while you are blowing that chiffon veil."

      The widow took the two ends of the offensive thing and tied them deliberately under her chin.

      "Some day," continued the bachelor, as he swung the canoe shoreward with a vigorous dip of the paddle, "I'm going to show you who's master. I'm going to marry you and then – "

      "Be sorry!" laughed the widow.

      "Of course," assented the bachelor, "but I'd be sorrier – if I didn't."

      II

      The Winning Card?

      "THERE," said the bachelor as he bowed to a little man across the room, "sits the eighth wonder of the world – a man with a squint and a cork leg and no income to speak of, who has just married for the third time. What makes us so fascinating?"

      The widow laid down her oyster fork and gazed thoughtfully at the beautiful girl in blue chiffon sitting opposite the man with the squint.

      "Don't generalize," she said, turning rebukingly to the bachelor. "You mean what makes the little man so fascinating?"

      The bachelor jabbed an oyster viciously.

      "Well," he grumbled, "what does make him so fascinating? Is it the squint or the cork – "

      The widow looked at him reproachfully.

      "Don't be envious," she said. "He might have two squints and yet be successful with women. Haven't you ever seen a runty, plain little man before, with nothing on earth, apparently, to recommend him except his sex, who could draw the women as a magnet does needles?"

      The bachelor dropped his oyster and stared at the widow.

      "It's hypnotism!" he declared with solemn conviction.

      The widow laughed.

      "It's nothing of the sort," she contradicted. "It's because he holds man's winning card and knows how to play it. Just observe the tender solicitude with which he consults her about that fish."

      "You mean," inquired the bachelor suspiciously, "that he has a fascinating way?"

      "That's all he needs," responded the widow promptly, "to make him irresistible."

      "Then, how do you account," argued the bachelor, indicating a Gibsonesque young man eating his dinner alone under a palm at the corner table, "for the popularity of that Greek god over there? He's a perfect boor, yet the women in this hotel pet him and coax him and cuddle him as if he were a prize lion cub."

      "Oh," remarked the widow, "if you were all Greek gods – that would be different. But, unfortunately, the average man is just an ungainly looking thing in a derby hat and hideous clothes, with knuckly hands and padded shoulders and a rough chin."

      "Thank you," said the bachelor sweetly. "I see – as in a looking glass. Evidently our countenances – "

      "Pooh!" jeered the widow, "your countenances just don't count. That's all. What profiteth it a man though he have the face of an Apollo if he have the legs of a Caliban? A woman never bothers about a man's face. It's his figure that attracts her. She will forgive weak eyes and a cut-off chin twice as quickly as weak shoulders and cut-off legs."

      "That's why we pad them – the shoulders," explained the bachelor.

      "You wouldn't need to," retorted the widow, "if you knew how to play the winning card."

      "What IS the winning card?" implored the bachelor, leaning across the table anxiously.

      The widow laid down her soup spoon and bent to arrange the violets in her belt meditatively.

      "Well," she said, "Sir Walter Raleigh played it and it won him a title; and Mr. Mantellini played it and it kept him in spending money and fancy waistcoats for years without his doing a stroke of work; and Louis XIV. – but oh, pshaw! You know all about that. Briefly speaking, a man's winning card is his knowledge of how to treat a woman. Specifically, it is a tender, solicitous, protecting manner. A woman just loves to be 'protected,' whether there is anything to be protected from or not. She loves to know that you are anxious for her safety and comfort, even when there is no cause in the world for your anxiety. She loves to have you wait on her, even when there is a room full of hired waiters about. She loves to be treated like an adorable, cunning, helpless child, even when she is five feet ten and weighs a cool two hundred. She delights in having a mental cloak laid down for her to walk over and every time you do it she secretly knights you."

      "It sounds awfully easy," said the bachelor.

      "But it isn't," retorted the widow, "if it were all men would try it – and all men would be perfectly irresistible."

      "Well, aren't they?" asked the bachelor, innocently. "I thought they – "

      "The winning way, the irresistible masculine manner," pursued the widow, ignoring the interruption, "is something subtle and inborn. It can't be put on or varnished over. It is neither a pose nor a patent. It is the gift of one of the good fairies at birth. If it is going to be trained into a man he must be caught and schooled very early – say, before he is ten years old. It's his ingrain attitude toward women and he begins by practicing it on his mother. If he is not to the manner born and tries to cultivate it late in life, he must watch very carefully to see that he does not overdo it like a lackey or a dancing master or the villain in a melodrama. Of course, it can be cultivated to a certain extent, like music or Christian Science, but it's hard for a man to learn that a woman is a fragile creature and needs a bodyguard, after he has been twenty years letting his sisters pack their own trunks and lug their own satchels and golf clubs. Besides, most men are too busy or too self-absorbed to cultivate it, if they could."

      "Most men," remarked the bachelor, stirring his coffee and lighting his cigarette, "aren't anxious to become the sort of 'mother's darling' you describe."

      "Nonsense," retorted the widow. "Richard the Third was a perfectly adorable ladies' man and he couldn't be called exactly – a 'mother's darling.' Yet the things he said to poor Lady Anne and the way he said them would have turned any feminine brain. It isn't milk and water that women admire; it's the milk of human interest. It's the feeling that a man is gazing at you instead of through you at his own reflection – or some other woman."

      "But if it means СКАЧАТЬ