, or several. It is the
demand that they shall not forfeit their right to respect and
morality, which is resented by the many who still conform to
traditional customs, and which general conformity results in investing
the term "free-love" with an unpleasant odor.

Public opinion puts a premium upon deceit.

Such intimate matters as marriage and divorce are really no concern of
any person other than the contracting or the "distracted" parties.

The public is too concerned with trivialities and too little with
Truth. Nothing short of national insanity permits the existence of
divorce-courts, and the necessity for married persons desiring to
live apart, to slander and abuse each other like pickpockets before
they may act upon such a decision.

Some time ago the public press was filled with the minutest details of
the love story of a woman, who had lived for fifteen years hidden from
the world because she loved a man well enough to pay that price.

She might have insisted that the man obtain a divorce from his wife,
to whom he had been married seventeen or more years, and thus win the
approval of society. But this woman placed love above all material
things, and she preferred to take nothing from the wife. The love of
her husband the wife did not possess and, it would seem, did not care
for particularly. When through the accident of the man's death the
story came to light, the press was flooded with letters from prominent
club-women and from clergymen and others, stating upon what terms, if
any, this love-recluse should be forgiven.

Most of them decided that she should not be forgiven; a few seemed to
think that if she "repented" and lived thereafter a "pure" life, she
might in time be worthy of their forgiveness.

Such a spectacle! America will yet share the reputation with England
of being a nation without a sense of humor.

Eagerly the representative members of society "rush in where angels
fear to tread" upon any and all occasions to air their opinions upon
other people's conduct and thus prove their own virtue.

The fact that this woman was not in any position to be forgiven or
unforgiven; that she was sublimely unconscious of and wholly
indifferent to their opinions; that she was unaware of any necessity
for either shame or repentance; seems not to have entered the silly
brains of these keepers of the public morals. She had loved one man
with a fidelity, a whole-heartedness, and a loftiness of
self-sacrifi