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PRELUDE

Love is misery—sweetened with imagination, salted with tears, spiced with doubt, flavored with novelty, and 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.

THE REFRAIN

SOMEHOW, JUST AT THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MOMENT WHEN A BACHELOR FANCIES THAT HE IS GOING TO DIE FOR LOVE OF A WOMAN, ANOTHER WOMAN ALWAYS COMES ALONG AND INTERRUPTS HIM

. . . and interrupts him.

BACHELORS

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 altruist who refrains from devoting himself to one woman in order that he may scatter sweetness and light amongst the multitude.

There is nothing quite so intriguing to a bachelor as flirting with the "idea of marriage"—with his fingers crossed. He just loves to "consider marrying" in the abstract and to go about pitying himself for being so "lonely."

There are three kinds of bachelors: the kind that must be driven into matrimony with a whip; the kind that must be coaxed with sugar; and the kind that must be blindfolded and backed into the shafts.

If you want to be chosen to brighten a bachelor's life, first make it dark and dreary; so long as women are willing to make his existence one long sweet song, naturally he isn't anxious to exchange it for a lullaby.

When a man actually asks a girl to marry him in these days of bachelor comforts and the deification of single-blessedness, she has a revelation of human unselfishness that stands as the eighth wonder of the world.

That tired expression on a bachelor's face is not so often the result of brain-fag from an overworked mind as of heart-fag from overworking the emotions.

Lovers look at life through rose-colored curtains; old bachelors see it through a fog.

Somehow, a bachelor never quite gets over the idea that he is a thing of beauty and a boy forever!

A bachelor fancies that it is his wonderful sixty-horse will-power that keeps him from marrying, whereas it is nothing but his little one-horse won't-power.

One consolation in marrying a bachelor over forty is that he has fought so long and so hard to escape the hook that there is no more fight left in him.

Never give up hope as long as a bachelor declares definitely, "No woman can get me!" Wait until he is so sure of his immunity that he sighs regretfully, "No woman will have me!"

The "vicious circle" in a bachelor's opinion, is the platinum one on a woman's third finger.

A Bachelor of Arts is one who makes love to a lot of women, and yet has the art to remain a bachelor.