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Show - 11 - ; FORGET IT. j S By DOROTHY DIX, The World's Highest Paid Woman Writer if l If I could choose a motto for my sex a motto that should be Illuminated Illuminat-ed on the walls of every house and pasted on every woman's mirror, where she would sec tl a thousand times a day it would be the slang phrase of the day, FORGET IT. The main trouble with women is that .they have too good memories. They remember things too long, too much and too often. The chief obstacle ob-stacle that stands in their way to happiness is that they are carrying such excess baggage of recollections of the past that they are handicapped by it. No matter what a woman's experi ences in the past have been, whether pood or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, she can never bear to close the door upon them. She is always turning them over in her mind, dwelling upon them, talking about them, living them over again in her imagination until she makes herself nothng but a perambulating per-ambulating back number, and a bore to everyone she meets. This coddling of happy memories of the past gives us that almost un- i bearable affliction, the woman who has sen better days. We all know her. You have not been two minutes in her company before she begins to tell you of the almost regal splendor in which she was' reared; of the palace pal-ace her home was, of the multitude of servants, of the perennial gaiety that went on; of what a belle she was, and how many ranks of suitors all rich and handsome were sighing sigh-ing at her feet; of the magnificence of her trousseau; of what a grand wedding she had, and so on, and' on. and on. and on, until she comes to the place where she begins to 'weep and says she never expected to come to this, and wants to know if you won't help her with the rent. Of course it may seem a harmless thing for those who in the present have only bread and water to eat, to feast upon the memories of thfa cakes and ale that they used to have in the past, but in reality it is a most demoralizing thing to do. A woman can make a dop- dream of her former for-mer granduer that will just as much Incapacitate her for dealing with 1 mri in i in ii present conditions as if she was drugged drug-ged with opium. When you find a woman who lives in tho memories of her golden past you will invariably find one who is a slacker, who Is shiftless, lazy, untidy un-tidy and Inefficient. She is the kind of a woman who, if sho take6 board ers, will expect her reminiscences ot her great uncle who was a senator to atone for tho fact that her rooms arc dirty and her meals never on time; or, if she takes in sewing, wilt expect her pedigree to make up for hooks and eyes never fitting and skirts hanging in pointB around the bottom. All the energy she needs to use in her business she exhausts In remembering the past It Is a great blessing to have been well born, to have had a childhood and youth full of sunshine and happiness and plenty but when they are over, thoy are over. They are done, finished fin-ished beyond recall, and the wise woman wo-man is she who puts thera behind her, who forgets them and lets other people peo-ple forget them, and who wastes no tlmin dreaming of halcyon days that are gonei but who rolls up her sleeves and grapples with today and wrlng6 something out of ii that is better and more substantial than a vague mem ory. If. however, the woman who la sloshing over with happy memories of the past is a pest, the woman who has unhappy memories is a scourge from which the boldest of us flee. Sho is an incarnate wet blanket, a human kill Joy. a tear jug whose contents are being continually spilled over us. At her approach every smile packs up its littlo kit bag and beats it for the tall timber. She has hardly taken her seat before she commences the j Iliad of her woes. She is a poor per secuted creature whom nobody loves ! or wants about, and whom everybody I slights. If she's poor she opmplaina that her employer doesn't apprecaite her, and shows .favoritism to others in the office. If she's rich the people peo-ple she does things for are not grateful grate-ful enough. If she has children she worries over them. If she has a husband, hus-band, he falls to come up to her ideals. If someone she loves has died, she never gets over it. Naturally you are expected to join in with this dreary drizzle and mingle your sobs with the lady's lamenta. tions, but what you want to do is to give her a good flhake and say, "For heaven's sake, FORGET IT." Suppose things have gone wrong wtih you, does It make them right lo brood over your grievance Suppose you have suffered in the past, does it make the day any cheerier to recall that pain? Suppose people have disappointed dis-appointed you, is it any comfort to keep it fresh In your mind? Why not forget it? Put the whole thing outside of your mind. Cast into oblivion the things that worry you. j You can do it if you will, and for a woman to keep herself sick, miserable and nervous feasting on the memories i of past misery is as hideous and neu- rotic a thing to do as it would be for her to spend her time clawing over the festering bones in a grave-j'ard. If women would only make up their minds' to do a little sensible forgetting forget-ting it would go a long way towards promoting domestic felicity. There are a great many women who aro unhappily married and who have hus bands who fall far short of being models of domestic virtue. Also there are many wen who are unhappily married mar-ried and whose wives will never qualify qual-ify in the household angel class. But men do not make a bad matter' worse by making a mental catalogue i of their wives' faults and repeating them over and over ns If they were a litany. Women do, and the more they dwell upon the memories ot their husband's hus-band's shortcomings, the bigger they grow until they get so large they blot i out all the sunshine of the world. It wives would only forget it when their husbands are irritable, or stay out lato, or are sling-, and especially if they could forget It when their litis, bands have made a mistake, or side stepped a little, il would go a long way towards making marriage a success suc-cess instead of a failure. It Is often' askod whether .the woman wom-an who has clone wrong can come back, If she can rehabilitate herself, and make whole the life she has maimed. The greatest difficulty in the way Is not th reformation but her feminine inability to forget it. She's always remembering it and letting It poison her life. She's always al-ways leltng her thoughts dwell on it until she imagines that even strangers strang-ers read her story in her faco, and she thinks about it so much that her mem-Dry mem-Dry becomes an obsession that forces ! tier lo tell her secret to other people. I If the woman who has taken the wrong turn in the road would only for-5et for-5et her past, as a man does his, sho , ould wipe off the slate and take a fresh start as easily as he does. Life is concerned only with today. Fhe past is valuable only as it teachea is how to live today. Learn how to forget. |