On Bond girls and the ways of gentlemen.
It must, I believe, be accepted as a common truth that if the most sincere and beautiful act that a woman can do for another woman is to hold her hair back for her while she is vomiting, then, for men, the equivalent act is to help one another with their neckties.
- A girl, Bond girl X, if you wish.
- A girl dresses like the boy she fell in love with--the one who tore up her heart---because she's no doll, she's a repetition of his story, always the same story. She dresses like him and paint her nails red and waits for the day she's caught. That day, he'd run into her quite by mistake, and, unable to miss the imitation, surrender enough to look at her with infinite pity. (All she wants, yes, is pity, now.) And he'll look at her and think, or say, "Poor little idiot-- that isn't the way you tie an ascot." And he'd help her with it, and that would be it, that would be all.
- And then, she knew, it would all be okay again.
- 'I'm happy,' she thinks, 'to be the standard against which he is glorious. For who will be more pathetic than him, if not I?'
--True gentlemen, see, ought to reconcile all notions of pride and proximity in the face of that most piteous thing: a poorly knotted tie. It should should inspire, rather than ridicule, a noble and fatherly pity, the opportunity for the coldest of men to fulfill their one good work, to give away that single onion. For without poor fools with clumsy fingers, what would we measure ourselves in relation to?