ple.

Another unreasonable love is that which a woman feels for a man who has
really treated her dishonorably. It is true that we do not love simply
for merit. There are sympathies between men and women as between parents
and children with which merit has little to do. One great reason that
emotional women attract men is because they can make a hero out of such
unheroic stuff. And why should we try always to see the exact reality as
if that were nearer the truth than the same reality transfigured by
ideal light? The more we believe in others, the better and happier we
all are. A man full of faults, selfish, and even vicious, may be helped
by a woman who trusts him. But when he has forsaken her, it is not often
that she can be of much real service to him. She must indeed forgive
him, but when she has genuinely forgiven him, the glamour of love will
usually have disappeared. If she insists upon shutting herself up from
other love for his sake, she should question herself as to the part
sentimentality and perversity bear in her character.

Most of the best work done in the world is done in the face of what seem
to be insurmountable difficulties. Our faith moves mountains. An
impossible duty is done. The fact that women ignore the impossibility is
their strongest power. This, I suppose, is what the physician meant when
he said that men liked a woman a little better if she was not always
governed by reason. "Love believeth all things, hopeth all things,
endureth all things." We all like to have such love as that lavished
upon us. It is a noble love which glorifies the object by keeping in
view all the time the ideal which is to be some day realized. It is
something very different from the weak love which distorts the object
simply because of its personal connection with us. But no doubt women
who are weakly emotional in this way do have a great attraction for men,
that is, so long as the man himself is an object of their emotions. Such
women are pretty sure to have lovers when better and more unselfish
women are overlooked. They do not wear very well, and men tire of them,
especially when they exercise their emotions in new fields; and as wives
(after marriage) and sisters and mothers they prefer the quieter and
less impassioned women. But the great and ardent loves which influence a
life still belong to the women of ardent feelings.

Ardent feelings well controlled,--that is our ideal; but how few women
of strong feelings