"As for friends--well, there are two classes, men and women. Men I need not trouble you about. If you haven't acquired the knack of handling them during the last ten years you never will, and are no Marrable. Women? I give it up! You can't standardise them. Men are fairly normal as a class. If you deal straight with a man he will realise and appreciate the fact, and though he may not respond by dealing straight with you, he will at any rate recognise you for what you are--a white man. But you can't depend on a woman to do that. They are far stronger in their likes and dislikes than we are, and are hopelessly capricious into the bargain. My general experience--and it has been wider than you might think--has been that, once a woman takes a fancy to you, you may run counter to every canon of honesty, sobriety, and common decency, and she will cleave to you--probably, I fancy, because you arouse all the protective maternal instinct in her. On the other hand, once you get into her bad books,--it may be because you deserve it, but as often as not it is because you have hot hands or once trod on her skirt in a waltz,--nothing that you can do will prevent her shuddering at the very mention of your name. Perhaps, from the point of view of the greatest good of the greatest number, a woman's method of sizing up the male sex is the best possible, but it comes hard on well-meaning but heavy-handed men like us. "We Marrables have always been men's men, although we have the profoundest reverence for women. (Perhaps that is the reason: a woman never wants you to reverence women; she wants you to reverence _her_.) What sticks in our throats is the enormous amount of make-believe and shilly-shallying that has to go on between the sexes before any definite business can be accomplished. Whenever I see a Marrable in a drawing-room, sitting on the edge of a chair and balancing a teacup, I always know exactly what he is there for, and I also know that he is dumbly resisting man's primitive instinct to pick up the right girl and _run_. When that feat, or its equivalent, has been accomplished, all is well: I have never known a Marrable who was not a complete success as a husband. But they are bad starters. "Your father was an exception. He had the good luck to meet a girl who knew a man when she saw one, and was willing to accept the will for the deed when she found him unable to express articulately what she would have loved to hear. By a further stroke of good luck her parents objected to him, so he had a comparative walk-over.