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Show The Woman of It. ' By ADA PATTERSON- Another of the wholesale marryers has been overtaken by the law. Having swindled a score or more'of women, having hav-ing married a half-dozen or so without subsequent divorce proceedings, and caused the suicide of one who had loss heart rebound than the others, he has been lodged in the Tombs, the New York : prison. I While he waits he talks. He is making the usual speeches of wholesale rnarryors and swindlers about women. "Tell them you, fell in love with them the first time you saw them. That always gets them." "Women are easy marks." "They can all be fooled if you begin talking love to them." "I am sorry it happened, but part of the fault is theirs." I am ashamed. I am always ashamed when a multiple husband boasts that women wo-men are silly little moths burning themselves them-selves at the flame of love. Aren't you ashamed that this can be said with some degree of truth of us? .Men say it is because we are vain that a compliment changes the color of the world for some of us. I grant that is true of some women I know. But behind and beneath the gullbilfty of women in matters of rc.mar.ee there is a deeper and more fundamental truth. Everyone likes to be approved. The most rudimentary of human units, the S-year-old papoose, or the grown Hottentot, Hotten-tot, is gratified by the praise wop by the fish brought from the pond, or the deer flung over the shoulder as trophy of the -lay's hunt. Love of approbation is as natural as hair or teeth. A woman should not be blamed for possessing a trait so human. After another generation a woman will bo better pleased if she !s praised for the work of her brain or her hands than for her eyes or her complexion. But that time is still years away. Pretty eyes and skin and hair have been their trade marks of success for so many centuries that we can't expect women all at once to ignore ig-nore the old and honored label. Deep and ineradicable in the heart is the desire to be loved. Daudet deplored "the terrible need of lovins-." Love of two happily mated persons Is the nearest approach to heaven on earth. The woes of the mismated are like the other state. Lives and honor have been lost in the search for gold. Every day's newspaper spreads the story of theft or fraud or emhlezzlement In the pursuit of money. Disgrace wrought by the pursuit of wealth is common. Disgrace caused by the craving for love is set down as evidence of mental aberration. Yet the last craving is more fundamentally human than the first. "The woman who makes a fool of herself her-self over a man who cares nothing for her" is the butt of a community's jokes. Put when a man's ship of affairs irons aground because he wanted to get rich quickly, that is regarded as a tragedy. I wish women were strong enough, sane enough, clear-eyed enough to avoid wholesales whole-sales marryers, the swindlers of hearts and purses. I wish they walked so carefully care-fully In the path of lite that they never stumbled. But if they did, how uncompanionable uncom-panionable they would be to men, the stumblers! The less men say about the heart mistakes mis-takes made by women the better. The only reason theirs do not come so readily to the surface is that they find a deeper hiding place for them. As it is, whose silly love letters adorn the daily newspapers news-papers after a day's reading of them in court In a breach of promise case? Men's. Who Is it who tell the unsympathetic courts that their wives never really loved them, that they have every reason to believe be-lieve they were married for their money? Men. Who complained loudly that, a foreign enchantress whom be had married had persuaded him to make over all his property prop-erty to her and that he wanted it back? A man. Let us stop saying, "That's the woman wo-man of It." Let us say, "that's the human of it," granting that both men and women have a deep-seated love of approbation: that vanity is to be found in both, and' that both desire to love and be loved. That granted, let both call the bead oftener Into conference with the heart. |