Show KATHLEEN NORRIS youthful errors leave scars TWENTY TWENTY YEARS ago a certain girl went off on a motor trip with a college friend she was 19 the boyfriend boy friend was 22 both were living on money sent by self denying and hardworking parents month after month so BO that the girl and boy might acquire a real education culture and tho the benefits of social contacts in a wider world the motor trip lasted live five days for those five days and they by any means days of unclouded happiness tho the girl threw away her honor it seemed fun to register as mr and mrs it seemed fun to spend his last 19 of allowance and the 10 she had borrowed from a sorority sister on the delights of little wayside meals and overnights at the picturesque mo me tola of southern california A motel metel Is an informal one story hastel ry and at many of them guests are not too closely questioned as to age aga or relationship this girl was a sensitive well bred proud young thing who came to me a few months after this brief interval ended half mad with self contempt and shame no she not going to have a baby the escapade left that scar tortured with remorse but she was was writhing under the burning misery of knowledge far too old tor for her 19 years knowledge that the boy taken the affair seriously at all knowledge that what she had thought a generous surender had only been a cheap yielding to his casual importunity knowledge that many of her col loge associates suspected what had occurred and the nicest of them help showing that they like it or her when a telegram came from a A taking mother girt about abou sick mother this girl returned gladly I 1 to her iowa home the boy had long since shown his complete comple to in difference and was taking another girl about our girl calgher call cal lher her anne felt a deepened shame when the she realized that he was the sort of boy who might under certain circumstances cum stances boast of his conquests well she went home and became a domestic angel she saw her mother through a long illness kept house tor for an adoring father and two small brothers filled to the brim her obligations as daughter stater sister friend and eventually wife and mother she married with dignity with position and modest wealth and with true love her husband never has lied had a suspicion of her early mistake cant escape calves FA ves so what the moral the moral lies iles in annes annea own heart every cheap dishonest vulgar careless thing we do in youth is stored away in our consciousness and in our characters we cant escape ourselves even though we escape esdar a everyone else probably the arrogant boy who made love to her 20 years ago suffered he was made do of coarser clay all colleges have scores of boys of this type unscrupulous attractive sure me of themselves and neither knowing or caring what results from their love affairs but anne Is 13 finely constructed the eho is sensitive to her fingertips her daughters are 16 and 9 now and there is a son in between and all their lives their mother has been building their characters with talk of self control and purity and goodness and in all these years back in her own consciousness has been the knowledge t that hat somewhere w in tho the world there lives a man who knows just how weak and gullible she was when she was a girl no man in the honorable and conscientious beginnings beginning of his remember se business life likes to remember member that when he was in high school he used to slip his band into the pockets ot of coats hanging up in the schoolhouse school housa hall and take what he found no man likes to remember the time he lied flatly and successfully I 1 about cheating in the finals in his freshman year the chance chanca that got him out of a disgraceful nightclub night club raid while the other fellows had to face the publicity and scandal of it anything to be proud of tn in later life these ghosts of past tollies follies and young sins rise to haunt us and to jar our self respect and sense of security in ia later years this Is so of all scho mistakes untruths Un truths that got someone else into trible teo uble small thefts and forgeries the abandoning of friends when one might make a safe escape from trouble and leave them behind cruelty to a devoted mother and more than all these these little foxes that gnaw and gnaw through our memories is the knowledge in a girls heart that in her unthinking girlhood she threw away something that meant nothing to her casual lover jover but so much more to herself than she ever dreamed for that particular relationship to a girl is the very key to tier her whole life it la Is the key to honor dignity wifehood position p ion home children it means these things to her whether she sha quite aulta knows it or not at 18 |