that even the most casual of compliments can be given that extra little touch that women adore.

In fact, once when I imprinted on a young lady’s lips a chaste and fatherly kiss for about five minutes, I stopped and said, sorrowfully, “Wouldn’t you rather be kissed by a twenty-one-year-old boy?”
She frowned and said, “Of course not. If you’d ever been kissed by a twenty-one-year-old boy you’d know better than to ask.”
Remember that. In any direct competition, the old man is bound to win and the young man knows it.

Innumerable surveys have made it quite clear that when a respectable elderly man makes up to a giggling young lady, it is not the giggling young lady so accosted that is offended by the action, but rather the granite-faced dowager, standing unnoticed by her side, who is. It is she who makes derogatory remarks concerning dirty old men, and is quite likely to attack him with an umbrella.

We must not be taken in by the myth of youth, the unending propaganda to the effect that young men are younger than old men; that they are better looking; that they are slimmer, stronger and more athletic; that they can hold a girl in more romantic fashion and speak more sweetly.

The fact of the matter is that young men lack skill and experience and are very likely to approach a girl as though she were a sack of wheat. It is the old man—suave, debonair, maturely charming—who knows exactly what to do and how to do it, and is therefore better at it.

Some readers may realize that this story, first published in 1956, has been overtaken by events. In 1965, astronomers discovered that Mercury does not keep one side always to the Sun, but has a period of rotation of about fifty-four days, so that all parts of it are exposed to the sunlight at one time or another.

Well, what can I do except say that I wish astronomers would get things right to begin with?

And I certainly refuse to change the story to suit their whims.