d toiled for
years, and lived in a fourth-flight-back tenement, would represent
luxury. To you, after a few months, they would mean absolute penury.

You would begin to miss your beautiful home, and your maids, and your
carriages. Your husband would know you were missing them, and he would
be miserable. Unless your father came to your rescue, your dream of
romantic love would end in a nightmare of regret and sorrow.

Your father knows you,--the creature of refined tastes and luxurious
habits that he has made you,--and your lover does not. Neither do you
know yourself.

It requires a woman in ten thousand, one possessed of absolute heroism,
like the old martyrs who sang at the stake while dying, to do what you
contemplate, and to be happy in the doing.

Nothing like a life of self-indulgence disintegrates great qualities.
You are romantically and feverishly in love with a handsome and gifted
young man. But do not rush into a marriage with him until you can bring
your father to settle a competence upon you, or until your lover has
spanned the abyss of poverty with a bridge of comfort. You have had no
training in self-denial or self-dependence. The altar is a bad place to
begin your first lesson.

Wait awhile. I know my advice seems worldly and cold, but it is the
result of wide observation.

If you cannot sit in your gold and white boudoir, and be true to Ernest
while he battles a few more years with destiny, then you could not
remain loyal in thought while you held your numb fingers over a chilly
radiator in an uncomfortable flat, or omitted dessert from your dinner
menu to cut down expenses.

Your brain-cells have been developed in opulence.

You could not train your mind to inexorable economy, even at the command
of Cupid.

Take the advice of a woman of the world, my dear girl, and do not
attempt the impossible and so spoil two lives.

Again I say, wait awhile.

There are girls who could be perfectly happy in the position you picture
for yourself with Ernest, but not you.

Better hide your ideal in your heart than shatter it on the unswept
hearthstone of the commonplace.

Better be in your lover's life the unattained joy, than ruin his
happiness by discontent.

It is less of a tragedy for a man to hear a woman say "I cannot go with
you," than to hear her say "I cannot stay with you."

To Miss Jane Carter

_Of the W.C.T.U._

And so, my dear Jane, I have fallen from my pedestal, in your
es