Page:Far from the Maddening Girls.djvu/25

 Pitfalls are as thick as bones in a shad. You wouldn’t suspect a mandolin of designs upon your celibacy, would you? — or a philopena, or a piece of embroidery, or a fan, or a box of candies? Poor innocent! Put a girl behind it, and a matchmaker standing close- hauled in the offing, and each and every one of them has an awful, a fatal significance. There are strings to the mandolin: wretched man, there will soon be one to you. What is the philopena but a symbol of matrimony? The girl never pays. And the embroidery: look how the poor thing is stretched and pulled and held in absolute bondage — with a ring! And the fan is shut up twenty times of an evening, and seen through the rest of the time. And the box of candies disagrees with you. So there! There is something that suggests a wife or a husband in every one of them. And when a man begins to dally with them, the first thing he knows the charm has worked, and he has popped, and been gobbled up, for