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Show talk slang and Venture upon expletives, as near profanity as they dare, for after all they ore generally thoroughly good women and would shrink from immorality immor-ality with an angry kind of virtue all their own. One cannot after all say that these attract men to their society, for they give the men no choice; they force their coinpaniouship upon them in all those sports which men have chosen to consider con-sider especially their own, and consequently conse-quently in the conversation resulting from those sports. They have thus tho pull over their "gentler sisters of a common com-mon topic and common occupation, and it not infrequently happens that a man marries such a woman just because he sees her all the time; tumply a case of propinquity. They make undesirable wives, however, especially if poor, for they are as impatient of woman's self sacrifices and quiet drudgery as a man is. I knew ono such girl, and when her baby was three months old she took it upon a yachting excursion and had a hammock slung on deck for it. But after all, the kind of woman that men generally marry belongs to none of these classes, but is simply a nonentity. There is no fault to be found with her; she is tolerably good looking, tolerably educated, edu-cated, tolerably good mannered and refined, re-fined, negatively moral, but quite untried un-tried by temptation; her ideas of marriage mar-riage limited to new clothes, wedding presents and cards with Mrs. instead of Miss upon them. She has never considered i the question of whether Charlie and she are adapted by habits, temperament and mutual intentions to make each other happy; she has never even resolved to do her best to make him happy; Bhe has never thought anything about it at all, and plunges into matrimony as she would into the ocean at a new bathing place, without the least idea- of what may lie beneath that summer sea. That is the average woman chosen as his wife by tho average man, and hence the average marriage which forms the topic of the satirist, and the cynic. What, then, is the description of "the' best woman," who is so seldom chosen, do you ask? I have not just now time to tell you, ! but you may, if you like, re-read the' quotation from the Vicar of Wakefield and draw your own inferences. Mrs. Frank Leslie. FAVORITES OF THE MEN Mrs. Frank Leslie Wants to Enow Whether the Lords of Oreation Like the Best Women Best. MEN'S IGNORANCE OF WOMEN. They Get Mad Because They Can't Understand, Under-stand, and So Say Bitter Things. ' r Do men like the best women best? So, they don't, and it is one of the most remarkable re-markable things in the study of the cruder sex to see how they pride themselves them-selves upon their discrimination with regard to women, and how very, very, very little they know about them. And this no doubt is one ground for the cynical, jaundiced, bitter scoffs and taunts flying about the world with regard re-gard to women, and all emanating from men. They thought they knew something some-thing about women, these poor cynics, nd they found they didn't, and instead of blaming their own stupidity they turned and rent the elusive objects of their mistaken theories. It is very annoying, I grant yon, for a (nan to build up a fine ideal temple 'heroin to enshrine his own image and watch the goddess of that temple sitting at the feet of her chosen lord, and then to suddenly discover that the temple was founded upon the "laughing Rands," and in some unusual quake the whole affair tumbles down, and his image is left ignominiously stranded in the mills! I suppose one woidd be tempted to re-Tile re-Tile the goddess who had mortified us to sorely. No, they don't understand women at all, these poor dear men, and nothing Vexes them more than to have this consciousness con-sciousness brought home to them; they are eo accustomed to feeling that the world runs on the lines that they have laid down that there is nothing in heaven or earth beyond or above their comprehension, and that they are, as Alexander Selkirk remarks of himself, "Lord of the fish and the brute," that, although woman is neither a fish nor a brute, they consider her as surely the Vassal of man as either of these. And then, when all this has been comfortably com-fortably arranged and Milord Man has settled himself pleasantly upon his throne, lo and behold the chief vassal isn't at all in the place he had arranged for her, but has shot off in an eccentric cfbit of her own and is away out of reach, "Such conduct as these" naturally natu-rally annoys "the monarch of all he surveys," sur-veys," and as it is impossible for him to do anything about it he vents his wrath in aaying a great deal, sometimes in the style of the fox who thought the grapes were sour because he couldn't reach them, and again, in the light and flippant fashion of a majestio intellect stooping to trifles, he flicks the woman question aside as one quite unworthy of his consideration, con-sideration, declaring that the habits and manners of the ephemera who dance for an hour above a sunny summer pool are more deserving of a man's attention than the yet lighter ephemeron, woman. One consequence of this process is that a tradition has grown up in the jnascu- line mind and Is transmitted from rather ra-ther to son as carefully as the unwritten laws of the Incas to the effect that women are deceitful exceedingly, are fair to the eye but deadly poison to the taste, are trivial and shallow of mind, and yet past masters in the art of hoodwinking men; that they are at once the weakest and most formidable form of creation, and although an unhappy instinct of man's nature, but no men don't have instincts although the profound processes pro-cesses of reason show that the world would not long continue without woman, wom-an, and therefore it is necessary that man should condone her offenses and seek her society, he should do so with the same fear and trembling that he handles dynamite or introduces electric wires into his warehouse. They all are powerful agents and the Lord of Creation does not intend to confess con-fess any object in bis dominion to be too many for him. So, although quite aware that dynamite may blow him and his to the farthest limit of limbo, and electricity elec-tricity will most likely set bis buildings o fire, and woman will oh, dear me, what words can describe the indescribable indescrib-able ills that woman can work in his life I still he does not, and does not in-teud in-teud to, do without any one of the three potencies and fuels quite sure that though other men have been hoisted with their own dynamite, conflagrated by their own electrics and destroyed with nameless horrors by the wouum whom they had either made or wished to make their own, they should escape. But just as every man tries to seenre the safest form of dynamite and the best protected electric wires would it not be supposed that he would be very careful to seenre the very best and least dangerous danger-ous kind of woman? But here the vaunted wisdom of the Lord of Creation seems to utterly fail him, and in choosing a wife he shows no more discrimination than tho child who dives into a grab bag at a fair. If there is any method at all in the matter it seems to operate the wrong way, for it is very, very seldom that a man fixes his affections upon the best woman of his acquaintance, or even npon the best womanor wo-manor him. What are the grounds of his choice, then? What kind of women do men like better than the best? Well, of course, youth and Iwauty are always sure cards, and I should be sorry indeed to lose the pleasure I derive from contemplating them myself; but we all know that there are beauties and beauties, beau-ties, and while some pretty faces are as attractive and refreshing as a handful of dewy flowers others are as monotonous as a photographed smile, and others again as deadly 6weet as nougat. And when we come to the matter of choosing a wife, which is of course the only very important result of men's preference of one woman over another, prettiness becomes merely a detail and not the one k'm qna non at least it ought to so become if the man is capable of looking before he leaps. A ijood many men are not. and instead of imitating the Vicar of Wakefield, who begins his memoirs by stating that ha chose his wife, as she did her wedding gown, not for the present effect, but for its promise of good wear, they end as a friend of my own did. He married a beauty, a sweet little Dresden shepherdess sort o.' thing, who one day came to me with a puckered brow to ask: "What conld Tom mean, do you suppose? sup-pose? Last night ho looked and looked info my eyes, .and at last he, said, .'Noth-, ing but blue eyes nothing more.' What should there be more do tell me?" "Why, nothing, dear," replied I truthfully. truth-fully. "They are very pretty blue eyes, and just as pretty now as when Tom first fell in love with them." But besides beauty, which is an obvious obvi-ous temptation to choose the wrong woman, there are at least a dozen other false lights wooing this poor, short sighted creature man to his destruction. destruc-tion. There is the style of woman which I have studied a good deal, but thus far with no satisfactory results. She is not pretty; she need not be very young; she may be maid, wife or widow, although rather apt to be the last. She in not very striking in any way and seldom allows herself to be conspicuous, but in some inscrutable way she "always gets there," if I may be allowed a bit of slang, and will never appear at any place where men do congregate without attracting them, as surely as the candle does the moths. She is not too brilliant a conversationalist con-versationalist a quality which generally gener-ally frightens men but she makes pretty speeches in a soft, low voice; she has a way of lighting up her face at the approach ap-proach of some favorite cavalier; she possesses infinite tact in harmonizing conflicting tempers and smoothing over rough places; Bhe is chameleon like in her power of adaptation to the moods or, prejudices of her companion of the moment. mo-ment. She is, in fact, charming, if one can get rid of a certain uncomfortable sense of the machinery. It is a IHtle too much like admiring Juliet, when you happen to know all about the actress' domestic and financial troubles, and, although you cordially exclaim, "How well she does it!" you never for a moment mo-ment fancy that she means what she says or is what sho appears. Now this kind of woman is not what I call thtt best for a man to choose as wife, and I am always sorry when I see it done. There is, however, one safeguard safe-guard for the so-easily-deceived sex; the charming woman is generally quite as practical as she is charming, and doesn't resign her power over all to take up with one unless it is very much to her advantage ad-vantage to do so; and if she does marry she is apt to become innoxious to other women, for great prosperity has a stultifying stulti-fying effect, and your "very wealthy woman seldom takes the trouble to charm. Another style of women apt to attract men, and not at all the best women for them to choose as wives, are the women who pay the coarser sex the compliment of imitating it. Happily this style is rather exotic with us, coming in" with the Anglomania so prevalent of late, and as it is by no means adapted to the climate cli-mate or to the delicate type of American femininity it has never thriven here as abroad. These are the women who bonst of never being tired; they rise at unearthly hours and drag their reluctant admirers with them to see sunrises and "catch morning effects," a euphemism forin-fhuwa; forin-fhuwa; put on short skirts and thick boots and taking alpenstocks in hand climb Mont Blanc as a morning's recreation recrea-tion (if that inaccessible top peak is ever reached it will be by one of theso women); wo-men); they ride at "big fences" and are "in at the death," and slash their riding habits with their whips as they loudly proclaim their own prowess in the chase; tbey "take a weed" more or less surreptitiously; surrep-titiously; they demand liquid refreshments refresh-ments of the most heroic nature; they |