ART OF PROPOSAL

Shannon News, 22 September 1925, Page 1

ART OF PROPOSAL

FASHIONS THAT HAVE CHANGED (By Stephen Leacock.) This is the time of the year when —if what the poets tell us is true — a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of household economics. It is a period during which any properly constituted young man makes at least one proposal of marriage. If he keeps on persistently making these proposals they are apt to end, sooner or later in marriage itself . At any rate, every young person ought to know' how proposals of marriage are made, and a few hints upon the point at this time of the yeat are” surely not out of place. We begin first of all with the Avay in which our great-grandfathers made their approaches to our great-grand-mothers. In those days they preferred to make their proposals in writing. A young man when he found himself hopelessly smitten retired to his room with a big bottle of ink and a auill pen and put together an epistle such as this:— Miss Malvinia Woolifeatlier, Wolifeather Grange. Featherdale on the Blink, Hants. Respected Madam, — The opportunities which I have of late enjoyed of observing the graces of your person and the cultivation of your mind, have filled me with feelings which I can better entrust to restraints of epistolary correspondence than confide to the hazard of an oral declaration.

I desire, my dear Miss Wollifeather, to offer myself as a suitor for your hand and to lay myself, my affections and estate upside down at your feet. Should you bid me rise, I shall deem myself the happiest of mortals. But should you not do so. I need only say that I should remain prone until a welcome demise should terminate ah existence heneforth witthout aim or meaning. 1, need hardly say that before inditing this letter I have obtained the full approval of your, father and have also consulted your mother and your aunts, all of whom are warmly in favour of my suit and permit me to press it. Allow me, with the liveliest feeling of affection, appreciation, esteem, reverence, to sign myself and to remain yours, my dear Malvinia, humbly, hopefully, but trembling, JOHN PEACHDOWN. The Quylers Inn, On the Blink. But now contrast with this beautiful document the way in which the proposal of marriage is made in up-to-date fiction. ! His voice as he turned toward her. Avas taut as a tie-line. “You don’t love me!” he lioarsed, thick with agony. She had angled into h seat and sat sensing-rather-than.seeing him. For a time she silenced. Then presently as he sat still and enveloped her: “Don’t!” she thinned, her Aoice fining to a thread. “Answer me.” he gloomed, and gazing into-and-tlaough. her. “She half, heard, half-didn’t-liear him. Night was falling about them as they sat thus behide the river. A molten afterglow of iridescent saffron shot with incandescent carmine lit up the Avaters of the Hudson till they glow r ed like electrified uranium.

For a while they both sat silentlooming. “It had to be,” she glumped.

/ >'Wliy l why?” he blimped. “Why it, have had to have been or '(more hopefully) even be to be? Surely you don’t mean because of money?” V She shuddered into lierself. The thing seemed to sting her (it hadn’t really). “Money! she almost-but-not. quite snarled. “You might have spared me that!” He sank down and And after they had sat thus for another half hour grassing and growling and angling and sensing one another, it turned out that all that he was trying to say was to ask if she would marry him. And she said“yes.” And now contrast with this sort of thing the way in which a proposal of marriage gets made among ordinary, inarticulate souls. He came into the park and right away he saw her sitting there on a bench. He kenw of course that she was waiting for him and she knew that »he had come there to meet her. But all lie said was. “Well, Liz!” and she said just “Well, Sam.” Then he said, “It’s pretty warm to-day,” and she said, “It certainly lias.” He said . “Ho you want to walk a piece?” and she answered: "I don’t care.” They strolled a little way together. The sinking sun may have been lighting up the west, there may have been | just one star poised in the evening i sky like a firefly and there may have; come to him that faint call of just; one thrush, but if these things ivere ! going on lie didn’t remark on it. All he said was: ‘I saw a cop arrest a fellow for speeding on a motor-cycle this afternoon.” And she said: “These motor-cycle fellers arc too fresh." •There was a silence and then he said: “Liz. I was thinking the other night after I got home that now tha

I got my increase of salary if you’d care to marry me we could do it., And she said: “Well I guess I’m agreeable if you are. Sam.” They walked on a little further in silence uind then lie stopped and half turned towards her and with his eyes looking right in the girl’s face he said tlioughfully: “It beats all -what a lot of cigar butts get thrown away in the park, don’t it?”