coyness from showing gallant attentions to men before marriage,
whereas the impulse to sacrifice happiness or life for love's sake is
at least as strong in them as in men, and of longer standing. If a
girl of affectionate impulses on hearing that the man she
loved--though he might not have proposed to her--lay wounded, or ill
of yellow fever, in a hospital, threw away all reserve, coyness, and
fear of violating decorum, and went to nurse him day and night, at
imminent risk of her own life, all the world would applaud her,
convinced that she had done a more feminine thing than if she had
allowed coyness to suppress her sympathetic and self-sacrificing
impulses.

XII. AFFECTION

A German poem printed in the _Wunderhorn_ relates how a young man,
after a long absence from home, returns and eagerly hastens to see his
former sweetheart. He finds her standing in the doorway and informs
her that her beauty pleases his heart as much as ever:

Gott gruess dich, du Huebsche, du Feine,
Von Herzen gefallst du mir.

To which she retorts: "What need is there of my pleasing you? I got a
husband long ago--a handsome man, well able to take care of me."
Whereupon the disappointed lover draws his knife and stabs her through
the heart.

In his _History of German Song_ (chap, v.), Edward Schure comments on
this poem in the following amazing fashion:

"How necessary yet how tragic is this answer with the
knife to the heartless challenge of the former
sweetheart! How fatal and terrible is this sudden
change of a passionate soul from ardent love to the
wildest hatred! We see him taking one step back, we see
how he trembles, how the flush of rage suffuses his
face, and how his love, offended, injured, and dragged
in the dust, slakes its thirst with the blood of the
faithless woman."

EROTIC ASSASSINS

It seems almost incredible that such a villanous sentiment should have
been allowed to appear in a book without sending its author to prison.
"Necessary" to _murder_ a sweetheart because she has changed her mind
during a man's long absence! The wildest anarchist plot never included
a more diabolical idea. Brainless, selfish, impulsive young idiots are
only too apt to act on that principle if their proposals are not
accepted; the papers contain cases nearly every week of poor girls
murdered for refusing an unwelcome suitor; but the world is beginning
to understand that it is il