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Show KATHLEEN NORRIS Youthful Errors Leave Scars "TWENTY YEARS ago a certain " girl went off on a motor trip with a college friend; she was 19, the boy-friend was 22. Both were living on money sent by self-denying and hardworking parents, par-ents, month after month, so that the girl and boy might acquire a real education, culture and the benefits of social contacts In a wider world. The motor trip lasted five days. For those five days, and they weren't by any means days of unclouded un-clouded happiness, 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 allow-ance and the $10 she had borrowed from a sorority sister on the delights de-lights of little wayside meals and overnights at the picturesque motels mo-tels of Southern California. A "motel" "mo-tel" is an informal one-story hostelry, hostel-ry, and at many of them guests are not too closely questioned as to age or relationship. This girl was a sensitive, well-bred, 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 was not going to have a baby; the escapade hadn't left that scar. Tortured with Remorse But she was writhing under the burning misery of knowledge far too old for her 19 years. Knowledge that the boy hadn't 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 college col-lege associates suspected what had occurred, and the nicest of them couldn't help showing that they didn't like it or her. When a telegram came from a 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 that somewhere some-where in 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 consciencious beginnings of his business life, likes to remember that when he was in high school, he used to slip bis hand into the pockets pock-ets of coats hanging up in the schoolhouse hall, and take what he found. No man likes to remember the time he lied flatly and successfully! success-fully! about cheating in the finals in his Freshman year. The chance that got him out of a disgraceful night-club raid, while the other fellows had to face the publicity and scandal of it, isn't anything to be proud of, in later life. These ghosts of past follies and young sins rise to haunt us and to jar our self-respect and sense of security in later years. This is so of all schoolday mistakes. mis-takes. Untruths that got someone else into trouble. Small thefts and forgeries. The abandoning of friends when one might make a safe escape es-cape 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 know-ledge in a girl's heart that in her unthinking girlhood, she threw away something that meant nothing noth-ing to her casual lover, but so much more to herself than she ever dreamed. For that particular relationship, to a girL is the very key to her whole life. It is the key to honor, dignity, wifehood, position, home, children. It means these things to her, whether she quite knows it or not at 18. ... taking another girl about . . . sick mother this girl returned gladly glad-ly to her Iowa home. The boy had long since shown his complete indifference in-difference and was taking another girl about. Our girl call her Anne felt a deepened shame when she realized that he was the sort of boy who might under certain circumstances cir-cumstances boast of his conquests. Well, she went home and became a domestic angel. She saw her mother through a long illness, kept house for an adoring father and two small brothers, filled to the brim her obligations as daughter, sister, friend, and eventually wife and mother. She married with dignity, dig-nity, with position and modest wealth, and with true love. Her husband never has had a suspicion of her early mistake. Can't Escape Selves So what? What's the moral? The moral lies in Anne's own heart. Every cheap, dishonest, vulgar careless thing we do In youth is stored away in our consciousness and in our characters. We can't escape ourselves, even though we escape everyone else. Probably the arrogant boy who made love to her 20 years ago hasn't suffered; he was made of coarser clay. All colleges col-leges have scores of boys of this type; unscrupulous, attractive, sure of themselves and neither knowing know-ing or caring what results from their love affairs. But Anne is finely constructed; she is sensitive to her fingertips. Her daughters are 16 and 9 now, and there is a son in between, and |