chin twice as quickly as weak shoulders and cut-off legs."

"That's why we pad them—the[22] shoulders," explained the bachelor.

[22]

"You wouldn't need to," retorted the widow, "if you knew how to play the winning card."

"What IS the winning card?" implored the bachelor, leaning across the table anxiously.

The widow laid down her soup spoon and bent to arrange the violets in her belt meditatively.

"Well," she said, "Sir Walter Raleigh played it and it won him a title; and Mr. Mantellini played it and it kept him in spending money and fancy waistcoats for years without his doing a stroke of work; and Louis XIV.—but oh, pshaw! You know all about that. Briefly speaking, a man's winning card is his knowledge of how to treat a woman. Specifically,[23] it is a tender, solicitous, protecting manner. A woman just loves to be 'protected,' whether there is anything to be protected from or not. She loves to know that you are anxious for her safety and comfort, even when there is no cause in the world for your anxiety. She loves to have you wait on her, even when there is a room full of hired waiters about. She loves to be treated like an adorable, cunning, helpless child, even when she is five feet ten and weighs a cool two hundred. She delights in having a mental cloak laid down for her to walk over and every time you do it she secretly knights you."

[23]

"It sounds awfully easy," said the bachelor.

"But it isn't," retorted the widow, "if it were all men would try it—and[24] all men would be perfectly irresistible."

[24]

"Well, aren't they?" asked the bachelor, innocently. "I thought they——"

"The winning way, the irresistible masculine manner," pursued the widow, ignoring the interruption, "is something subtle and inborn. It can't be put on or varnished over. It is neither a pose nor a patent. It is the gift of one of the good fairies at birth. If it is going to be trained into a man he must be caught and schooled very early—say, before he is ten years old. It's his ingrain attitude toward women and he begins by practicing it on his 

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