ce which are as rare as they are great in these days of
pretense and hypocritical virtue, and she had paid the full price for
her idealism. She did not repine or regret. She only suffered, not
alone because of her unenviable notoriety, but because Death had taken
her loved one from her. Surely this was indeed an evidence of real
love in an unreal civilization, which should have brought out the
fearless sympathy and approval of every good woman in the land. It
should have been food for sermons in every pulpit in Christendom, that
a modern woman preferred solitary confinement with the man she loved
to the usual method of procedure, which insists upon the respectable
position of wife, no matter at what cost to another.

But this is Society's estimate of Love and Truth and Virtue, and it is
small wonder if real people become indifferent to Society's feelings.

If the term free-love were really synonymous with sex-promiscuity, we
would hear it used in connection with those whose frequent divorces
are the subject of press comment, but we do not, because by their
outward concession to established ethics they subscribe to the demands
of Convention.

The term, in its opprobrious sense, is almost always applied to women,
because for many centuries the men have claimed their right to
personal liberty in matters connected with the sex-relation, and until
women of the self-respecting and educated class began to openly
emulate the example of the male, there was no occasion to use the
phrase. Men come under its lash only when they, too, concede to women
the right to respectability notwithstanding defiance of tradition.

All of which goes to prove that the public mind is in reality
sufficiently clear on the matter of distinction between sex
promiscuity and free-love. It is likewise obvious that the opprobrium
that attaches to the phrase is not aimed at promiscuity but at the
claim to personal liberty in matters of the sex-relation and defiance
of Public Opinion which demands either ostensible concurrence in its
standards, or punishment for openly transgressing them.

The result of this unjust (and unfit, in the light of our other
advanced ideas) attitude toward the most important function of life,
has resulted in one of two lines of conduct as woman's only free
choice.

Either she must resort to deception, hypocrisy and pretense, shielding
her secret excursions into forbidden paths, by feigning a scorn and
abhorrence for the doc