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Show KATHLEEN NORMS Husband Forgives Indiscretion band, I say In answer, your wife is only paying the price, or rather a small part of the price, of irresponsibility irrespon-sibility in college days. Sex freedom free-dom seems thrilling and natural to girls then, as indeed it is. But so is playing with matches in the hands of small boys, and so is taking out the high-powered car or the unfamiliar unfa-miliar little power boat In a boy's later years. Fifty thousand lives a year is what we pay for these escapades in car accidents alone, and in fire casualties and serious burns and blindness and lameness you can multiply that by 10. No matter how salacious and suggestive our learned advisers are, in the current cur-rent magazines, they all come out at the end with the same old law girls and boys, too must be controlled con-trolled by character. If Edith hadn't had to pay through the revolting channel of blackmail, she would have paid, anyway. She would relive every hour of that old association with shame and regret. If she had discovered dis-covered that you paid your last-year last-year college bills by forgery, she'd feel as you do that is wasn't you who did it. It was that confused and undeveloped boy who was going go-ing to be you. Put that to her someday. some-day. And put it to her that you admire, ad-mire, as I do, the simple courage with which she sent this rat of a blackmailer straight to you. "TJERE IS A DISTRESSED hus-1 hus-1 band writing you," says a letter in my mail this week. "I am asking you an age-old question," Hugh Von Ahlm's note goes on, "but the question is: Is the answer age-old too? "I love Edith, my wife, very dearly. I am five years older, we have three very small sons. Edith is kind, capable, devoted to me and the boys, altogether a splendid person. Because of her extraordinary extraordi-nary understanding and patience, we have never had a quarrel in our seven years of married life. "About two weeks ago Edith told me that a man whom I never had met, but had heard her mention as one of her college crowd, was going go-ing to call on me, in the hope of selling me three letters of hers. She distinctly recollected that she had written him but three times, for they had seen each other constantly con-stantly during the last months of her college year, after which he had left for his home in a distant state. She wrote three times, under the most agonizing stress a girl of 19 can know. He never answered. She never has seen him since. I need hardly say that he is today a contemptible rotter, and that my one interview with him will be my last. Blackmail "My wife told me the situation quietly, saying that this man wanted want-ed $500 apiece for each of these three letters, and asking me to buy them. She said she had told him to ". . . sex freedom seems thrlling . . come to me, and he came. I identified identi-fied the letters, paid for them, and burned them unread before his eyes. For Edith's sake I didn't horsewhip him as I might otherwise other-wise have done. "When I went home Edith asked me if I wanted a divorce. I said no, I wanted nothing but that our life should go on as it has been, for all these happy years. She told me that she bitterly regretted having kept these things from me at the time of our engagement, and asked ask-ed if my knowledge of them would have made a difference in my feeling feel-ing for ber. I said that it might nave done so. but that we had proved our devotion and compatibility compati-bility today, and I wanted it all forgotten. for-gotten. "Edith, however, had moved herself her-self into a small room next (o the nursery, professing concern for the middle boy, who had a bronchial cold, and she is staying there. She has changed frfra the cheerful, busy mistress of the house to a nervous, .silent woman who shows altogether too much willingness to enslave and sacrifice herself, and of late she has been asking me again if 1 do not want a divorce. I've told her that I was no saint, as a kid. It doesn't help. "This seems to me to rather reverse re-verse anything I would have expected ex-pected of this state of affairs. I find myself the one who Is suing for reinstatement. I am of Dutch descent, undemonstrative and silent si-lent by nature. Edith is or was the light and warmth of the house. To have her tearful and shaken and evasive breaks us all up. Am I treating this problem lightly, and what else should I do?" Faying the Price To this good, bewildered hus- |