e but a courtesy title--the count and
the no-account, the lord and the Lord knows who! The Yankee girl with a
_dot_ had become before the world war a regular quarry for impecunious
aristocrats and clever crooks, the matrimonial results tragic in their
frequency and squalor.

Another curious circumstance is the readiness with which the American
newspaper tumbles to these frauds. The yellow press especially
luxuriates in them; woodcuts the callow bedizened bride, the jaded
game-worn groom; dilates upon the big money interchanged; glows over the
tin-plate stars and imaginary garters and pinchbeck crowns; and keeping
the pictorial paraphernalia in cold but not forgotten storage waits for
the inevitable scandal, and then, with lavish exaggeration, works the
old story over again.

These newspapers ring all the sensational changes. Now it is the
wondrous beauty with the cool million, who, having married some
illegitimate of a minor royal house, will probably be the next Queen
of Rigmarolia, and now--ever increasing the dose--it is the
ten-million-dollar widow who is going to marry the King of Pontarabia's
brother, and may thus aspire to be one day Empress of Sahara.

Old European travelers can recall many funny and sometimes melancholy
incidents--episodes--histories--of which they have witnessed the
beginning and the end, carrying the self-same denouement and lesson.

IV

As there are women and women there are many kinds of adventuresses;
not all of them wicked and detestable. But, good or bad, the lot of
the adventuress is at best a hard lot. Be she a girl with a future or a
woman with a past she is still a woman, and the world can never be too
kind to its women--the child bearers, the home makers, the moral light
of the universe as they meet the purpose of God and Nature and seek not
to thwart it by unsexing themselves in order that they may keep step
with man in ways of self-indulgent dalliance. The adventuress of fiction
always comes to grief. But the adventuress in real life--the prudent
adventuress who draws the line at adultery--the would-be leader of
society without the wealth--the would-be political leader without the
masculine fiber--is sure of disappointment in the end.

Take the agitation over Suffragism. What is it that the woman
suffragette expects to get? No one of them can, or does, clearly tell
us.

It is feminism, rather than suffragism, which is dangerous. Now that
they have it, my fear is tha