spend their time in wondering why they are not loved, trying
various schemes and pitiful experiments, and passing by the simple
method of trying to be lovable and unconscious of self.

[Sidenote: "The Milk of Human Kindness"]

"The milk of human kindness" seldom produces cream, but there is only
one way by which love may be won or kept. Perfection means a continual
shifting of standards and must ever be unattainable, but the man or
woman who is simply lovable will be wholly taken into other
hearts--faults and all.

Now and then a man's love is hopeless, from causes which are innate and
beyond control. Sometimes regret strikes deep and lasts for more than a
day, as in the pages of the story books which women love to read.
Sometimes, too, a tender-hearted woman, seeing far into the future, will
do her best to spare a fellow-creature pain.

[Sidenote: The Wine of Conquest]

But this is the exception, rather than the rule. The average woman
regards a certain number of proposals as but a just tribute to her own
charm. Sometimes she sees what she has unconsciously done when it is too
late to retreat, but even then, though pity, regret, and honest pain
may result from it, there is one effect more certain still--the
intoxication of the wine of conquest, against which no woman is proof.

Love Letters: Old and New

[Illustration]

Love Letters: Old and New

[Sidenote: The Average Love Letter]

The average love letter is sufficient to make a sensitive spinster weep,
unless she herself is in love and the letter be addressed to her. The
first stage of the tender passion renders a man careless as to his
punctuation, the second seriously affects his spelling, and in the last
period of the malady, his grammar develops locomotor ataxia. The single
blessedness of school-teachers is largely to be attributed to this
cause.

A real love letter is absolutely ridiculous to everyone except the
writer and the recipient. A composition, which repeats the same term of
endearment thirteen times on a page, has certainly no particular claim
to literary art.

When a man writes a love letter, dated, and fully identified by name and
address, there is no question but that he is in earnest. A large number
of people consider nothing so innocently entertaining as love letters,
read in a court-room, with due attention to effect, by the counsel for
the other side.

Affairs of that kind are given scarlet headlines in the saffron