No, if you are going to profit by this at all, do not talk it over
with any woman you love. Talk it over with some clever woman who will
tell you the truth because she has nothing to lose. A man will always
take more from a woman whom he does not love than he will from his own
sweetheart or wife.
I wonder why things are so. Is it that ideal love is only founded upon
the truth and the superstructure is built of fabrications? Is it that
we women are much more artistic and more clever at masquerading the
truth that we make so much better lovers than the men? Oh, the scores
and scores of men who have told me what their wives thought of them,
and then the looks these wives have shot at me across the flowers on
the dinner-table! Only one glance, which no man caught, telegraphing,
"Do I, though? You are a woman and you know. You know what I would
have if I could, but how I have had to make him believe that he was
all of that, because he is my husband." Not that she is dissatisfied
with him. Not that she would give him up. Not that she would leave him
or have anybody else if she could. She loves him all she can, and he
loves her all he wants to. He has won the game, but he has not played
for all there was in it.
I never have been able to make up my mind whether ideal love was the
best, or if love with a great deal of common-sense in it was not the
most philosophical and better in the long-run.
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