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The Ideal Man! Oh, the Ideal
Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we
were children. He should refuse all our serious requests, and
gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have
caprices, and forbid us to have missions. He should always say much
more than he means, and always mean much more than he says. He
should never run down other pretty women. That would show he had no
taste, or make one suspect that he had too much. No; he should be
nice about them all, but say that somehow they don't attract him. If
we ask him a question about anything, he should give us an answer
all about ourselves. He should invariably praise us for whatever
qualities he knows we haven't got. But he should be pitiless, quite
pitiless, in reproaching us for the virtues that we have never
dreamed of possessing. He should never believe that we know the use
of useful things. That would be unforgivable. But he should shower
on us everything we don't want. He should persistently compromise us
in public, and treat us with absolute respect when we are alone. And
yet he should be always ready to have a perfectly terrible scene,
whenever we want one, and to become miserable, absolutely miserable,
at a moment's notice, and to overwhelm us with just reproaches in
less than twenty minutes, and to be positively violent at the end of
half an hour, and to leave us for ever at a quarter to eight, when
we have to go and dress for dinner. And when, after that, one has
seen him for really the last time, and he has refused to take back
the little things he has given one, and promised never to
communicate with one again, or to write one any foolish letters, he
should be perfectly broken-hearted, and telegraph to one all day
long, and send one little notes every half-hour by a private hansom,
and dine quite alone at the club, so that every one should know how
unhappy he was. And after a whole dreadful week, during which one
has gone about everywhere with one's husband, just to show how
absolutely lonely one was, he may be given a third last parting, in
the evening, and then, if his conduct has been quite irreproachable,
and one has behaved really badly to him, he should be allowed to
admit that he has been entirely in the wrong, and when he has
admitted that, it becomes a woman's duty to forgive, and one can do
it all over again from the beginning, with variations. |
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