You know how a woman would do it. She would give a tilt to her hat and a pull here and there, and then she would walk in and say:

    “I know it’s perfectly horrible, but I simply can’t remember the etiquette of this sort of thing. Please do tell me, General.”

    And the general, who has only eleven hundred things to do before eating a bite of lunch on the top of his desk, will get up and gravely instruct her. Which is exactly like a man, of course.

    Men overdo etiquette sometimes, because of a conventional fear of slipping up somewhere. There was a nice Red Cross major in France who had had no instruction in military matters, and had no arrogance whatever. So he used to salute all the privates and the

     M. P.’s

    before they had a chance. He was usually asking the road to somewhere or other, and they would stand staring after him thoughtfully until he was quite out of sight.

    And as a corollary to this conventionality, how wretched men are when they are placed in false positions! Nobody likes it, of course, but a woman can generally get out of it. Men think

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    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 

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