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Show j WOMAN'S TEARS, IDLE TEARS. What has lxfome of woman's tears, !idle tears? A cynical old bachelor lately remarked in the hearing of a woman wo-man that he wondered what had become be-come of a.ll Uie cryinj? members of her fcx. He paid that he had not t-een a I vomnn cry in some years and that, so I far as lie could t-ve, there are just an J muny thinps to cry over as there ever I were, and just as many women. He I did not object to the absence of tears; I he only wondered about it. I , This thin? has received attentions of various kinds before now. It was- first noticed in the novels. The young woman wo-man in modem fiction does not do nearly so much weepins; as she used to do. To be sure, she has not always so much excuse for it. When a young lady was carried away by a fierce and determined lover whom she did not want, and told that unless she married j him at once her family and all her im- mediate friends would be killeiVlhere was really a considerable excuse for J tears and swoons on her part. This j type of heroine nourished in the ,be- Sinning of the present century. She I was followed by the heroine who cried as a child does to get something she j wanted and usually got it, it happen- I ed nvit to be the moon or anything tquaJly unattainable. puranimfs sne was a young iaay 01 religious predilections and sihed tears over the furrows of others, or over her own religious sentiments. It has been estimated by careful statisticians that JIiVs Kllen Montgomery, heroine of '"The Wide. Wide World." must have Khed at least five gallons, two quarts and one pint of tears in the course of her adventures in two volumes. Kut the young lady in the modern work of fiction d'les not cry. If she is of a passionate pas-sionate nature she now and then-"bursts then-"bursts into a storm of sobs," but she does not often do it, as old-fashioned people would say, '"before folks." She is more likely to preserve a calm and more or lessi uncomprchended silence. Another type of modern hei-oine is the cheery girl who endures all her tribulations tribula-tions in silence, or laughs about them, and is the sunshine of the family cir cle while her heart is secretly breaking It' must be confessed that this type of young lady would be considerably more to the taste of the ordinary man than the old-fashioned type of tearful patience. The "man's woman" courageous, cour-ageous, gay, tolerant and reserved as to her private feelings is coming to to the front in fiction, and this ideal is decidedJy worth studying by the novel-reading novel-reading girls of today. . |