"You have been very successful with the girls — what's your rule in making love to one?"

Gibson's pen-and-ink drawing pairs two figures central to his social universe: a Gibson Girl in a trailing evening gown — corseted, poised, glancing away with studied indifference — and a shorter, somewhat hapless young man in formal tail-coat and striped trousers, hands pocketed, gazing at her with an expression of mild, self-aware foolishness. Gibson's targets here are class and courtship ritual. The caption's joke turns on self-deprecating honesty: the successful suitor's secret is calculated self-abasement. Gibson skewers masculine romantic vanity by letting the man cheerfully confess his own absurdity — a wry inversion of the era's breezy confidence that social performance and sincerity were the same thing.