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Show KATHLEEN NORRIS Wife Rues Early Indiscretion problem is this. I don't feel fit to be this man's wife. I feel that one of his sisters would be a better mother to my children. I feel the past staining and spoiling everything every-thing I try to teach them of character, charac-ter, purity and self-control. Now that Gerald may have to accept a high public office, I feel that something some-thing about me, and all that old weakness and foolishness, may come up to hurt him. "I want to go away away away from persons and scenes that have always been higher and finer than anything I knew as a girl. I am frightened; a woman has to have some training, some help, to live certain parts in life, and I'm not fit for this one. I'm stamped with sordidness and commonness and associations with boys as ignorant and headstrong as I was myself. Help me to see this in a right light. Help me to find courage to do what is right." Well, of course I wrote this woman, wom-an, who is only 33 now, that she was not different from' the rest of us in feeling that whole passages from the past might well be wiped from our records, and that we had behaved be-haved as stupidly, as selfishly, as blindly, and sometimes as ham fully and wrongly as possible. A GIRL who has been an absolute fool in her teens may grow up eventually to be a wise, unselfish, useful woman. But the trouble is that while she is still acting as a fool she commits herself to various conditions, and when she wakes up to common sense and something like balanced judgment, she finds herself so entangled en-tangled in difficulties that the result re-sult is often a state of deep discouragement discour-agement and depression. This is Ethel Nevin's case. Ethel writes me from Wilkes Barre, on curiously enough! her husband's advice. Inasmuch as her greatest difficulty stems from this very same husband, the situation is unusual, to say the least. She says that her husband thinks my advice may help her. Ethel writes that when she was a girl she "did what all the other girls did. We went through grammar gram-mar and high school grades together, and at about 13 or 14 began to get pretty intimate with boys. When I was 17 I. already had had lovers I know this sounds horrible, but I am telling you the truth and that year I took my first job and got engaged, and of course got myself into trouble. x Learned a Lesson "Well, Mom and Dad got me through that, and I learned my lesson. les-son. The lesson was right there for me to learn all along, my mother was a fine woman, and she did her best to warn me, but nothing could jr- x vg . . already baa covers ..." keep me from making a fool of myself. my-self. The boy behaved like the little scared rabbit he was, got his aunt to send him west to college, got into the army, and died in an army hospital. hos-pital. "I know I had no right to feel so humiliated and so mad, but somehow some-how the thought that he and I really had thought ourselves in love, and might have had a little boy or girl of our own, iickened me. It really sickened me, and for about six years love affairs meant nothing to me, I studied, I had a year at Oxford, Ox-ford, and I had a book published about cooking. Then I married Gerald. Ger-ald. We had known each other three years, and he knew all that he would let me tell him about myself long before he asked me to marry him. "So here came what I never dared dream of in my ugly teens. A fine man, admirable and earnest in every way, a fine old home set in a deep garden, a fine family all ready to welcome me. To make the picture perfect Gerald told me of his own infatuation for a married woman in France, and most of the whole bad story. This woman killed herself. He told me this of course to balance what I had told him. He is like that. Feels Unclean "We have a beautiful daughter of 9, and five younger sons, going down to twins of three months. My |