Page:Oh Well You Know How Women Are - Isn't That Just Like a Man.djvu/47

 straighter than women, but not so fast. I dined .one night on shipboard with the captain of the transport on which I came back from France, and there was an army chaplain at the table. So, as chaplains frequently say grace before meat, I put a hand on the knee of a young male member of my family beside me and kept it there, ready for a squeeze to admonish silence. But the chaplain did not say grace, and the man on my right suddenly turned out to be a perfectly strange general in a state of helpless uneasiness. I have a suspicion that not even the absolute impeccability of my subsequent conduct convinced him that I was not a designing woman.

But, although we are discussing men, as all women know, there are really no men at all. There are grown-up boys, and middle-aged boys, and elderly boys, and even sometimes very old boys. But the essential difference is simply exterior. Your man is always a boy. He grows tidier, and he gathers up a mass of heterogeneous information, and in the strangest possible fashion as the years go on, boards have to be put into the dining-room table, and the shoe bill becomes something terrible, and during some of his peregrinations he feels rather like a comet with a tail. The dentist's bills and where to go for the summer and do-you-think-the-nurse- is-as-careful-as- she - should - be - with - baby's - bottles