rry cannot keep straight without some one to help him. I must marry
him now. He needs me!"

Two years after her marriage she died of a broken heart, whispering at
the last to a dear friend that she "was not sorry to go, but would be
thankful life was over if she were only sure that her year-old baby
would not be left to Harry's care."

Yet he was in most respects tender and considerate. The trouble was
that his devotion to her remained at the point at which it stood when
he became her husband. The habit of intemperance grew.

Suppose that, added to this great fault, had been others still more
vicious. Had his been a coarse brutal nature, would not the idea of
reformation have been still more hopeless?

A woman, in tying herself for life to an unprincipled man who has
yielded to the dictates of sin year after year, forgets that he has
lost to a great extent his better nature and is now hardly responsible
for his actions. The spirit may indeed be willing, but the flesh is
lamentably weak. The appetites that have been long indulged do not
relinquish their claims after only a few months' restraint, and when
the girl for whose sake they have been repressed is won, they will
return to the swept and garnished room, and the last end of their
victim will be worse than the first.

I often wonder what a good, pure woman promises herself when she
proposes to entwine her clean life with one that is scarred, seamed
and blackened. Evade the truth as she may, there are but two courses
for her to pursue. She must either live a lonely life apart from her
husband's, frowning down, or silently showing disapproval of his
habits, or she must, to preserve peace and the semblance of happiness,
bring herself down to his level and become even less delicate and more
degraded than he. For is not a coarse woman always more abhorrent
than a coarse man? There are the instincts of her entire moral and
physical nature to be cast aside before she can descend to vulgarity.
In the one case her husband will hate her, while in the other she will
lose his respect and will despise herself.

An evil life so blunts the conscience that the wife of an unreformed
man need hardly expect him to be faithful to her. If a man will sin
against common decency, morality and social codes, he will sin against
his wife.

There is another aspect of the case to be considered. The American
girl of to-day seldom takes the possibility of offspring into her
matrimonial pl