Love Quote by Edgar Watson Howe

Edgar Watson Howe’s line has the sly confidence of a newsroom maxim: provocative, quotable, and built to sound like hard truth about human nature. But its real subject isn’t romance so much as social choreography. In Howe’s era, “respectable” femininity was supposed to be passive, with courtship framed as men acting and women receiving. So the quote smuggles in a wink: everyone knows women do pursue desire, but they must do it “a little,” at a safe, deniable volume. The phrase “chase…a little” is doing the ideological heavy lifting, granting permission while policing the boundaries.

The intent reads less like celebration of female agency than a tidy test for male ego. Love becomes measurable by whether a woman supplies pursuit, effort, reassurance. It’s a flattering script for men: if she doesn’t perform the chase, you’re not unloved, you’re simply unchosen by the rules of romance. That converts rejection into a diagnostic, a gentler story for the rejected party to tell himself.

There’s also an editor’s instinct for conflict and reversals. The line inverts the standard pursuit narrative just enough to feel daring, without truly upsetting the hierarchy. “Chase” implies competition, sport, a marketplace of attention. That metaphor narrows love to pursuit dynamics, not mutuality, compatibility, or care. In modern terms, it’s less a statement about affection than about the cultural demand that desire be legible through performance - and that women’s desire, in particular, must arrive packaged as playful pursuit rather than straightforward wanting.