Shoo, sisters, dry your weeping eyes and be comforted by the knowledge
that your grief is a purely imaginary one. It is not a broken heart but In
flammation of the imagination that ails you. You are shedding tears over
the dream that every woman dreams and from which every woman wakes up
with a shock of surprise.
For every woman believes that she Is getting a husband who will be a
perpetual sweetie, a financial wizard and who will be as dough In her hands.
Then when she finds out that instead of having a man who Is an aggregation
of all masculine charms and virtues she appears to have drawn a husband
who seems to her to monopolize most of the faults of his sex, a man who Is
dumb at love-making and not much of a money-getter, who is as irritable as
the fretful porcupine and as stubborn as a mule, why then she begins to think
tenderly of the man she didn’t marry and she Is very apt to crow n the head
of her former sweetheart with a halo.
• • * •
CO SHE goes on an orgy of self-pity, and spends hours of morbid pleasure
in digging up her dead love out of Its grave and holding an autopsy
over it. and thinking how happy she would have been if she had married the
mpn she didn’t marry and whom she pictures as a perfect being with none
of the faults that afflict the man she did marry.
She lets her mind dwell on this picture of her former sweetheart until
she persuades herself that she has a deathless passion for him and that by
failing to marry him she has wrecked her life.
