swallowed with your eyes shut. Marriage is the miracle that transforms a kiss from a pleasure into a duty, and a lie from a luxury into a necessity. A husband is what is left of a lover, after the nerve has been extracted. A man's heart is like a barber shop in which the cry is always, "NEXT!" The discovery of rice-powder on his coat-lapel makes a college-boy swagger, a bachelor blush, and a married man tremble. It takes one woman twenty years to make a man of her son—and another woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him. By the time a man has discovered that he is in love with a woman, she is usually so fagged out waiting for the phenomenon, that she is ready to topple right over into his arms from sheer exhaustion. A man always asks for "just one kiss"—because he knows that, if he can get that, the rest will come without asking. Somehow, the moment a man has surrendered the key of his heart to a woman, he begins to think about changing the lock. There are only two ages, at which a man faces the altar without a shudder; at twenty when he doesn't know what's happening to him—and at eighty when he doesn't care. A confirmed bachelor is so sure of his ability to dodge, that he is willing to amuse every pretty girl he meets, by handing her a rope and daring her to catch him. A bachelor is a large body of egotism, completely surrounded by caution and fortified at all points by suspicion. His chief products are wild oats and cynicism; his chief industry is dodging matrimony; his undeviating policy "Protection!" and his watch-word, "Give me liberty or give me death!" The average bachelor is so afraid of falling into matrimony, nowadays, that he sprinkles the path of love with ashes instead of with roses. The care with which a bachelor chaperones himself would inspire even the duenna of a fashionable boarding school with envy. A bachelor's idea of "safety first" consists in getting tangled up with a lot of women in order to avoid getting tied up to one. He is an
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