ver has a platonic friendship with a woman it is impossible for
him to love. Cupid is the high-priest at these rites of reading aloud
and discussing everything under the sun. The two become so closely bound
that one arrow strikes both, and often the happiest marriages are those
whose love has so begun, for when the Great Passion dies, as it
sometimes does, sympathy and mutual understanding may yield a generous
measure of content.

The present happy era of fiction closes a story abruptly at the altar or
else begins it immediately after the ceremony. Thence the enthralled
reader is conducted through rapture, doubt, misunderstanding,
indifference, complications, recrimination, and estrangement to the
logical end in cynicism and the divorce court.

In the books which women write, the hero of the story shoulders the
blame, and often has to bear his creator's vituperation in addition to
his other troubles. When a man essays this theme in fiction, he shows
clearly that it is the woman's fault. When the situation is presented
outside of books, the happily married critics distribute condemnation in
the same way, it being customary for each partner in a happy marriage to
claim the entire credit for the mutual content.

[Sidenote: Pursuit and Possession]

Over the afternoon tea cups it has been decided with unusual and
refreshing accord, that "it is pursuit and not possession with a man."
True--but is it less true with women?

When Her Ladyship finally acquires the sealskin coat on which she has
long set her heart, does she continue to scan the advertisements? Does
she still coddle him who hath all power as to sealskin coats, with
tempting dishes and unusual smiles? Not unless she wants something else.

Still, it is woman's tendency to make the best of what she has, and
man's to reach out for what he has not. Man spends his life in the
effort to realise the ideals which, like will-o'-the-wisps, hover just
beyond him. Woman, on the contrary, brings into her life what grace she
may, by idealising her reals.

In her secret heart, woman holds her unchanging ideal of her own
possible perfection. Sometimes a man suspects this, and loves her all
the more for the sweet guardian angel which is thus enthroned. Other
men, less fine, consider an ideal a sort of disease--and they are
usually a certain specific.

But, after all, men are as women make them. Cleopatra and Helen of Troy
swayed empires and rocked thrones. There is no woman