That all the die-away old maids, who go sighing through creation with a rose-leaf to their noses, lecturing married women, and sniveling for their little privileges, had but one neck, and that some muscular coat-sleeve, equal to the occasion, would give them one satisfying hug, and stop their nonsense.
I never witnessed an execution; but I saw a man the other day, married he surely was, trying to select a lace collar from out a dainty cobweb heap, sufficiently perplexing even to a practised female eye. The clumsy way he poised the gauzy things on his forefinger, with his head askew, trying to comprehend their respective merits! The long, weary sigh he drew, as the shopman handed him new specimens. The look of relief with which he heard _me_ inquire for lace collars, saying, as plain as looks could say, "Ah! now, thank Heaven, I shall have a woman's view of the subject!" The _disinterested_ manner in which, with this view, he pushed a stool forward for me to sit down, to watch upon which collar my eye fell complacently, all the while turning over _his_ heap in the same idiotic way. Oh, it was funny! Of course, I kept him on the anxious seat a little while, persistently holding my tongue, the better to enjoy his dilemma. Didn't he fidget?
At length, fearful he might rush out for strychnine, I spake. I descanted upon shape, and texture, and pattern, and upon the probability of their "doing up" well, to all of which my rueful knight listened like a criminal who scents a reprieve. Then I made my selection; then he chose two exactly like mine, before you could wink, and with a sublime gratitude, refused to let the shopman consider the bill that was fluttering in his gloved fingers, "till he had made change for the lady." We understood each other, for there are cases in which words are superfluous. No doubt his wife thought his taste in collars was excellent.
Men have _one_ virtue; for instance: How delicious is their blunt, honest frankness toward each other, in their every-day intercourse, (politicians excepted,) in contrast with the polite little subterfuges, which form the basis of women-friendships. When one man goes to make a man-call on another, he talks when he pleases, and puts up his heels, and _don't_ talk when he don't please. He is free to take a nap, or to take a book; and his host is as free, when he has had enough of him, or has any call away, to put on his hat and go out to attend to it: nor does the caller feel himself aggrieved. Now a woman's nose, under similar circumstances, would be up in the air a month, with the "slight" her female friend had put upon her. The more a woman _don't_ want her friend to stay, the more she is bound to urge her to do it; and to ask her why she hadn't called before; and to wish that she might never go away, and all that sort of thing. What she remarks to her husband in private about it, afterward, is a thing you and I have nothing to do with. When two men meet, after a long absence, ten to one the first salutation is, "Old boy, how ugly you've grown." In the female department we reverse this. "I never saw you look prettier," being the preface to the aside--(what a fright she has become). Then--("blest be the tie that binds")--mark one man meet another in the street--light his cigar at that other's nose, and pass on--without knowing the important fact, whether he lives in "a brown-stone front" or not. How instructive the free-and-easy-and-audacious-manner in which, after this ceremony, they go their several ways to their tombstones, without a spoken word. See them in the streets, my sisters, exchanging passing remarks on any object of momentary street-interest, looking over one another's shoulders at each other's "extras," all the same as if they had been introduced in an orthodox Grundy fashion.