As one strolls observingly through society, one discovers it is some people's mission in life to draw other people out. It is rare to find two persons talking together who give and take with equal facility, who contribute equally to the charm and brightness of the occasion. One of the two is sure to lead the other into those conversational oases where he loves to gambol--and very hard work it sometimes is!
Alas! the pioneers who soft-soap are usually women. You dear and uncomplaining sex, how hard you have to work to be called charming by that other sex that so greedily laps up the invention of the great humourist! From artisans of soft-soap you have indeed become artists. To you we owe those delightful multitudes of spoilt men who sulk or sniff or shoulder their pretentious way through society. Yes, your product! If society consisted only of men it would be quite sincere, even if rather brutal, and as for soft-soap, it wouldn't exist. It would be interesting to know the sex of that historical serpent in the Garden of Eden!
A man, if he ever soft-soaps another man, does it for a definite object and hardly realises his own insincerity, but a woman--well, it is a woman's religion to make a man think her charming, and I am afraid--desperately afraid--that she does this most successfully when she makes him talk about himself. Women, poor things, are like the heathen: first they create an idol, sometimes out of very common clay it is to be feared, and then they proceed to worship it.
How often does a man turn over in his mind what subject of conversation the woman will talk about best with whom accident has thrown him, especially if she be plain and shy? Now, what about women, on the other hand? Why, a man must be a great idiot indeed if he does not find some woman to coo little nothings at him; to lead him tenderly out of narrow, monosyllabic paths into the glowing buttercup and dandelion fields of conversation where he can gambol joyfully. "I came out strong, by Jove!" he congratulates himself proudly as they separate, and the goose never realises, as he supports himself against his usual wall and stares vacantly at the crowd, that the beguiling young thing, who smiled up at him like a rising sun, laboured with him with an energy which would have appalled a coal-heaver. Now, would a man fatigue himself as much to chatter with an empty-headed unattractive girl? Hand on heart, gentlemen, confess!