.

"You've had every advantage; attended one of the most expensive schools
in this country; had all the money you required, coming-out party and
all that; pleasures, flattery, attention--everything to make a girl
contented. You've visited any one you pleased from one end of the United
States to the other; traveled in Europe, Florida--anywhere you wanted;
come and gone at will. Nothing to handicap you. Nothing hard. Nothing
difficult. You'll agree. And what have you done with your advantages?
_What_--I want to know?"

Ruth shrugged her shoulders again.

"You can't blame any one but yourself. You haven't been interfered with.
I believed in letting you run your own affairs. Thought you were made of
the right stuff to do it creditably. I was mistaken. You've had a fair
trial at your own management and you've failed to show satisfactory
results. Now _I'm_ going to step in. _I'm_ going to see if _I_ can save
you from this drifting about and getting nowhere. I don't ask you to go
back and anchor with Robert Jennings again. I'm shocked to confess that
I don't believe you're worthy of a man like Jennings. It is no small
thing to be decided carelessly or frivolously--this matter of marriage.
Engaged to two men inside of one year, and now both affairs broken off.
It's disgraceful! You've got to learn somehow or other that although you
are a woman, you're not especially privileged to go back on decisions."

"I don't want to be especially privileged," said Ruth, and then she
added, "special privileges would not be expected by women, if they were
given equal rights."

"Oh, Suffrage!!!" exclaimed Tom with three exclamation points. "So
that's it! That's at the bottom of all this trouble."

"That's at the bottom of it," suddenly put in my husband, emphatically.

"Oh, I see. Well, first, Ruth, you're to drop all that nonsense.
Suffrage indeed! What do _you_ know about it? You ought to be married
and taking care of your own babies, and you wouldn't be disturbed by all
these crazy-headed fads, invented by dissatisfied and unoccupied
females. Suffrage! And perhaps you think that this latest exhibition of
your changeableness and vacillation is an argument in favor of it."

"You needn't throw women's vacillation in their faces, Tom," replied
Ruth calmly. "Stable decisions are matters of training and education.
Girls of my acquaintance lack the experience with the business world.
They don't come in contact with big transactions. They'r