Quaint Courtships

_Not Known

English

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Below is a summary of Quaint Courtships






QUAINT COURTSHIPS


Harper's Novelettes


EDITED BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS AND HENRY MILLS ALDEN


1906




MARGARET DELAND

AN ENCORE


NORMAN DUNCAN

A ROMANCE OF WHOOPING HARBOR


MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN

HYACINTHUS


SEWELL FORD

JANE'S GRAY EYES


HERMAN WHITAKER

A STIFF CONDITION


MAY HARRIS

IN THE INTERESTS OF CHRISTOPHER


FRANCIS WILLING WHARTON

THE WRONG DOOR


WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

BRAYBRIDGE'S OFFER


ELIA W. PEATTIE

THE RUBAIYAT AND THE LINER


ANNIE HAMILTON DONNELL

THE MINISTER




Introduction


To the perverse all courtships probably are quaint; but if ever human
nature may be allowed the full range of originality, it may very well be
in the exciting and very personal moments of making love. Our own
peculiar social structure, in which the sexes have so much innocent
freedom, and youth is left almost entirely to its own devices in the
arrangement of double happiness, is so favorable to the expression of
character at these supreme moments, that it is wonderful there is so
little which is idiosyncratic in our wooings. They tend rather to a
type, very simple, very normal, and most people get married for the
reason that they are in love, as if it were the most matter-of-course
affair of life. They find the fact of being in love so entirely
satisfying to the ideal, that they seek nothing adventitious from
circumstance to heighten their tremendous consciousness.

Yet, here and there people, even American people, are so placed that
they take from the situation a color of eccentricity, if they impart
none to it, and the old, old story, which we all wish to have end well,
zigzags to a fortunate close past juts and angles of individuality which
the heroes and heroines have not willingly or wittingly thrown out. They
would have chosen to arrive smoothly and uneventfully at the goal, as by
far the greater majority do; and probably if they are aware of looking
quaint to others in their progress, they do not like it. But it is this
peculiar difference which renders them interesting and charming to the
spectator. If we all love a lover, as Emerson says, it is not because of
his selfish happiness, but because of the odd and unexpected chances
which for the time exalt him above our experience, and endear him to our