on than
positive happiness would compensate her for. She appears to take a certain
negative pleasure in it. Their marriage is the product of a false
civilization, and I pity them--at a distance--from the bottom of my heart.
I am sorry for Brandt, too, for he honestly loved Alice and might have
proved the hundredth man--who knows?

I do not quite know whether to be sorry for May Brandt or not, for she
made complications and made them purposely. She made them so promptly,
too, that she precluded the possibility of a reconciliation between Alice
and Brandt. If Brandt had remained single, I doubt whether Alice would
have had the courage to form an engagement with any other man. She loved
him too truly to take the first step towards an eternal separation. Women
seldom dare make that first move, except as a decoy. They are naturally
superstitious, and even when curiously free from this trait in everything
else, they cling to a little in love, and dare not tempt Fate too
insolently.

A woman who has quarrelled with her lover, in her secret heart expects him
back daily and hourly, no matter what the cause of the estrangement, until
he becomes involved with another woman. Then she lays all the blame of his
defection at the door of the alien, where, in the opinion of an Old Maid,
it generally belongs.

If other women would let men alone, constancy would be less of a hollow
mockery. (Query, but is it constancy where there is no temptation to be
fickle?) Nevertheless, let "another woman" sympathize with an estranged
lover, and place a little delicate blame upon his sweetheart and flatter
him a great deal, and _presto!_ you have one of those criss-cross
engagements which turns life to a dull gray for the aching heart which
is left out.

If, too, when this honestly loving woman appears to take the first step,
her actions and mental processes could be analyzed and timed, it
frequently would prove that, with her quicker calculations, she foresaw
the fatal effect of the "other-woman" element, and, desirous of protecting
her vanity, reached blindly out to the nearest man at her command, and
married him with magnificent effrontery, just to circumvent humiliation
and to take a little wind out of the other woman's sails. But could you
make her lover believe that? Never.

And so May Lawrence played the "other woman" in the Asbury tragedy. I
wonder if she is satisfied with her role. A girl who wilfully catches a
man's heart on the rebou