ation are important parts of living. Instead
of praying aloud to God to forgive her sins, show the God spirit in
yourself by forgiving and forgetting and helping her to forget.

And now a word about yourself.

You are twenty-four, lovely, sympathetic, fond of children and animals,
wholesome and normal in your habits, without crankiness, and popular
with both sexes. While there are many wives and widows possessed of
these qualities, there seems to be some handicap to the spinster in the
race of life who undertakes to arrive at middle age with all the womanly
attributes. Almost invariably she drops some of them by the wayside. She
becomes overorderly and fussy--so that association with her for any
length of time is insupportable--or careless and indifferent. Or she may
grow inordinately devoted to animal pets, and bitter and critical toward
children and married people.

She may develop mannish traits, and dress and appear more like a man
than a feminine woman.

She may ride a hobby, to the discomfort of all other equestrians or
pedestrians on the earth's highway. She may grow so argumentative and
positive that she is intolerant and intolerable. And whichever of these
peculiarities are hers, she is quite sure to be wholly unconscious of
it, while she is quick to see that of another. Now watch yourself, my
dear Sybyl, as you walk alone toward middle life; do not allow yourself
to grow queer or impossible. It was God's intent that every plant should
blossom and bear fruit, and that every human being should mate and
produce offspring. The plant that fails in any of its functions is
usually blighted in some way, and the woman who fails of life's full
experiences seems to show some repellent peculiarity. But she need not,
once she sets a watch upon herself; she has a conscious soul and mind,
and can control such tendencies if she will.

It is unnatural for a woman to live without the daily companionship of
man. The superior single woman must make tenfold the effort of the
inferior wife, to maintain her balance into maturity, because of her
enforced solitude. As the wife-mother grows older she is kept in touch
with youth, and with the world, while the opportunities for close
companionship with the young lessen as a single woman passes forty,
unless she makes herself especially adaptable, agreeable, and
sympathetic.

And this is what I want you to do. At twenty-four it is none too soon to
begin planning for a charming matu