[Sidenote:  Opportunity for Fine Work]

There is opportunity for fine work in the situation which the young woman immediately develops.  A man may take his choice of the evils which lie before him, for almost anything may happen.

He may complain, and if he shows anger, there is war.  If he betrays jealousy, there is trouble which marriage will accentuate, rather than lessen.  If he shows concern because his beloved is so fickle, and insinuates that so unstable a person will not make a good wife, he touches pride in a vital spot and his cause is no more.  Let him be manfully unconcerned; as far above jealousy and angry reproach as a St. Bernard is above a kitten—­and Mademoiselle is his.

Philosophers laugh at woman’s fickleness, but her constancy, when once awakened, endures beyond life and death, and sometimes beyond betrayal.  But this is not to be won by a jealous man, for jealousy is the mother-in-law of selfishness, and a woman never permits a man to rival her in her own particular field.

[Sidenote:  Another Danger]

If a man safely passes the test of probation, there is yet another danger which lies between him and the realisation of his ambition.  This is the tendency of women to conduct excavations into a man’s previous affairs.

He needs the wisdom of the serpent at this juncture, for under the smiling sweetness a dagger is often concealed.  If the point is allowed to show during an engagement, the whole blade will frequently flash during marriage.

“Yes, dearest,” a man will say, tenderly, “I have loved before, but that was long ago—­long before I met you.  She was beautiful, tall, dark, majestic, with a regal nature like herself—­Good Heavens, how I loved her!”

This is apt to continue for some little time, if a man gets thoroughly interested in his subject and thinks he is talking rather well, before he discovers that his petite blonde divinity is either a frozen statue, or a veritable Niobe as to tears.  And not one man in three hundred and nineteen ever suspects what he has done!

[Sidenote:  The Thought of Defection]

A woman is more jealous of the girls a man has loved, whom she has never seen, than of any number of attractive rivals.  In the blind adoration which he yields her, she takes no thought of immediate defection, for her smile always makes him happy—­her voice never loses its mystic power over his senses.

On the contrary, a man never stoops to be jealous of the men who have pleaded in vain for what he has won, nor even of possible fiances whom later discretion has discarded.  He is sure of her at the present moment and his doubt centres itself comfortably upon the future, which is always shadowy and unreal to a man, because he is less imaginative than woman.

And yet—­there is no more dangerous companion for a woman than the man who has loved her.  It is easier to waken a woman’s old love than to teach her a new affection.  Strangely enough, the woman a man has once loved and then forgotten is powerless in the after years.  A man’s dead friendship may dream of resurrection, but never his dead love.