By Susan Bennett Holmes
Your second move is to restrain yourself. Having achieved a chance to be near him or having come upon one unexpectedly, you will, if you don’t hold onto your head, overdo it in one direction or another. Depending on your temperament and the state of your emotions, you may either collapse on the nearest hassock and gaze at him, limp with adoration, or you will talk a blue streak while the talking’s good. This can only make him think you come from a long and distinguished line of train announcers. Men are rarely as stirred by deep thoughts, expressed or written across your face, as they are by the fun going on around the piano, or the neat backhand driven crosscourt. Naturally, you can’t turn yourself into an Alice Marble, but you can tie yourself in with activity. You can sing while someone else bangs on the piano. You can help put together the eats in the kitchen and nonchalantly offer him a tasty hot dog. You can offer to start the magnetic darts if the inhabitants don’t mind risking an ancestor on the wall. But in any case, you are a girl of in action. Where you are, there’s something going on. And that’s where he wants to be.
And suppose it works, say you. Suppose you succeed in bringing yourself into focus as a girl who is fun to be with and he asks you to dance or for a whole date. Then what? What’ll you ever say?
This always delights us. It proves the fallacy of all the bromide cracks about women doing all the talking. Every girl in the world has wondered what to say at the serious moments of her life. Men can always go on and on.
If possible, forget you picked him out for yours. Above, we made the distinction between clutching at him and talking his ear off, and doing something. But now you’ll have to consider your conversation carefully. If you forget how wonderful he is, you’ll relax and enjoy yourself. That’s contagious. Back in your mind is stored a whole tangle of gags, stories, things that happened on the football schedule last fall, of which you could unsnarl and bring out if you don’t feel self-conscious. On the whole, you won’t have trouble if you are on the quiet side. Men prefer silent attention – they find it more flattering than any you can put into words.
From here on out you are on your own. Whether or not he’ll settle on you as the only girl in the world worth parting with his gold basketball for, no one can predict. But in the process of getting this far, you will have gained something else – and possibly somebody else. For a gal who is fun and eager to be out doing things is a gal that more than one guy could go for. You will wake up to find that you’ve a spotlight all your own. And the exciting thing about life is that at your age there is more than one man you could die for.
Stag-line view. How do you look when you’re dancing? Oddly enough, you can do more damage to yourself as a dancer with your face and posture than with your feet. (Extreme cases excepted!) Peering hopefully at other men over the shoulder you are now draped on denotes-um-uh-hopelessness. A Greek mask expressing confusion and despair placed over your normally happy countenance is well-nigh fatal. But if you stand up, talk once in a while to your partner, and show a little interest, if you can smile or laugh with some conviction, and if, above all, you can keep your eyes on a level higher than the supercilious speculative gaze of the stag line, you will be considered worth risking a cut-in. And if you can manage to be a heavenly dancer having a heavenly time, you’ll look angelic!
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