Aging & Wisdom Quote by George Dennison Prentice

Prentice’s line is a neat little trapdoor: it invites a complaint about female coldness, then drops the complainer into the punchline. The “young man” thinks he’s diagnosing a moral defect - “no heart” as shorthand for cruelty or indifference. Prentice flips it into romantic arithmetic. If he’s wounded enough to protest, it’s because he’s already emotionally invested; she “has his” heart, whether she wants it, returns it, or even notices it. The joke works because it exposes how often accusations are just disguised admissions.

As an editor in the 19th-century American press, Prentice wrote for a culture that prized public wit and private restraint. Courtship was governed by coded behavior, reputations, and gendered expectations: men were allowed the drama of pursuit, women were expected to manage attention without appearing eager. Calling a woman “heartless” was a socially acceptable way for a rejected man to salvage pride by reframing his loss as her failure. Prentice punctures that ego-defense. The subtext is: your grievance isn’t evidence of her emptiness; it’s evidence of your surrender.

There’s also a sly warning baked in. The man’s complaint doubles as proof of vulnerability, and vulnerability is socially risky. Prentice doesn’t moralize; he laughs, which is sharper. By making the man’s indignation self-incriminating, he turns romantic resentment into self-portraiture: the loudest claim of her “no heart” is often the quietest confession that his is already gone.