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Show Kathleen Norris Says: Women Pay Great Price for Indiscretion (Bell Syndicate WNU Service.) a 1 msrft. My married life was perfect until a man I knew in college turned up in our neighborhood. The story of our affair is not new. All the lessons in the world can't save me from what is going on now. By KATHLEEN NORRIS NO LANGUAGE is strong enough to convince young boys tHat theft and forgery are wrong. And not merely wrong in being punishable crimes. Wrong because be-cause of what they do to a boy's character, even if he is never found out. Wrong in boyhood, because the stolen quarter or the forged school excuse are steps to more serious seri-ous forgeries and thefts, and once schooled well in those directions it takes heroic fortitude forti-tude it takes indeed a complete com-plete change of personality, to resist later temptations. In the same way I wish I could find words impressive enough to help girls to see just how great is the price women have to pay for that thrilling "giving in" to the young lovers of school and college days. If your husband told you, one of these cosy winter evenings, that during dur-ing his senior year at college he supported himself entirely by stealing steal-ing and forging, you would be horrified. hor-rified. You couldn't laugh it off, tell him that it didn't make the slightest difference to you. You could not honestly say, "I love you for what you are, dear, not for what you were." Having sold his honor once, you would feel and the world would feel he might sell it again. And in exactly ex-actly the same way a man knows that a girl, who was reckless in giving giv-ing her favors in girlhood, is not going go-ing quite suddenly to attain an entirely en-tirely different position toward what .ought always to be the sacred symbol sym-bol of her honor. ' NOT WORTH IT No amount of good advice will keep some girls from saying say-ing to themselves "Everyone else does it, why shouldn't I?" So they willingly give away their future security and peace of mind. Perhaps they do "get away with it" jor a while. But sooner or later they must come face to face with their earlier indiscretion, only to find that it really wasn't worth it after all. Be sure to read Kathleen Norris' advice to the "J. G." of this letter, a happily married woman whose girlhood folly threatens to destroy her home and the love of her invalid husband. pride and faith in her if it were made known. Such a case is that of "J.G.," who writes me from Georgia: "When I married my husband, I loved him," says her letter, "but now after 11 years of unclouded happiness hap-piness I know that my early love was only a shadow of what real love could be! He is not a strong man; we live for our garden, our books, and our one daughter.. ' "Reggie was invalided after a terrible bout with pneumonia four years ago, and we took what capital we had and bought a tiny farm, which my nine-year-old Rachael and I have brought to the point of being an asset rather than a liability. Meanwhile Reg had started writing, little bookish essays at first, for which he was not paid; later more ambitious literary studies, one of. which is to be published in book form in the spring. Our lives were perfect per-fect perfect perfect, until a man I used to know as a college student turned up in the neighborhood. "The story of our old affair is no new one to you. I thought it con- These are old-fashioned phrases, and to girls mine seems an old-fashioned attitude. But I can assure them that, viewed in the light of later years, they will see the whole thing differently. It would be easier for a young wife to explain to her husband that she lifted some money out of the department-store cash register when she was working there years before her marriage, than to explain that she was intimate for a few months with one of the men who is known to her husband in business. Buried Secrets Reappear. Of course, if she can avoid it, and , hope permanently to avoid it, a girl doesn't tell her prospective husband these things. But that security isn't always as sound as it seems. Hardly a day goes by without bringing me j a desperate letter from some young j wife who has supposed her secret long forgotten and buried. Many of these women say that, feeling it would be more comfortable comfort-able to admit to the affair before marriage and start on an apparently apparent-ly honest basis, they have softened the story by saying that the man was "someone you never met. He died the following year." This does smooth things over for the moment. Few men, especially in anticipation of an immediate marriage to an adored woman, will waste time on jealousy of a dead man. But matters are much worse when the perverse turn of events brings this man into contact with the family again, and the unsuspecting unsuspect-ing husband is perhaps cordial to him. So that the wife must either make a clean breast of the whole thing, or put up with the insufferable insuffer-able situation of having a secret with one of the guests of the house that would crush her husband's cerned only ourselves. I was away from home for the first time, and 'every other girl did it, why not I?' The 15 years between that time and this have been disciplinary years, and I know they have made me a finer and wiser woman than anything that was promised by the nature of that girl of 19. "But all the lessons in the world can't save me from what is going on now. I suppose you would call it blackmail. Victor amuses Reggie, who calls him a 'rough diamond,' and Victor wants to come and live with us. He has no job, no money, no ambition. He has grown heavy and lazy, but on the three occasions when he has called he has, as I say, made himself amusing, and outlined what he would like to do with the farm to develop it. "Oh, Reg wouldn't divorce me or leave me," the letter concludes, "but his faith in me, his pleasure in what he calls my lily' girlhood, would receive re-ceive a terrible shock. He is not strong; he cannot go about as other men do. He has so few pleasures! His utter pride in Rachael and me is the greatest of them all." I've written "J. G." telling her that the only way out is the way of full confession. That means she can dismiss the odious Victor in no uncertain un-certain terms and then resume her happy way of life with no further reference to the cloud that has come up so suddenly. Victor will have her old letters, of course, and she the sting of old memories. And Reg will have to replace his idealistic love for his wife with something less fragile less perfect. I wonder what her answer would be today if she could hear that girl, of 15 years ago, asking, "What's the difference?" |
