I Beg Your Pardon

It was a work week, nothing too exciting going on, but a stray thought would go through my head occasionally. Like, for instance, one is told that in the 19th century, a woman who wanted to make the acquaintance of a man on the street would pretend to drop her handkerchief, and if he returned her interest he would pick it up, beg her pardon, tell her she'd dropped it, and the acquaintanceship would get rolling. Well and good, I think we're all adults here and realize that even in Victorian times, a woman who liked the cut of a man's jib would want some way to let him know. I mean, underneath the bustles and crinolines, people are still people, and there was never a time when they didn't know what a jib was for. But I'm musing about this, and I think, well, what if the guy doesn't pick it up? Do you keep walking on your crestfallen way? Do you pout and stamp your little foot? Do you double back, in the hope that some grubby little urchin hasn't picked up your handkerchief and sold it to a ragpicker? And what if you're a woman who's full of, shall we say, vitality, and you typically like the cut of the jib of five or six men that you see in a typical evening's walk? Did women carry capacious handkerchief bags back then? How many would you go through, in a week? Like I've said before, this is the kind of thing I'm thinking about when I'm looking pensive. Other people are thinking about how to get more money. Not me!