e the fact and become their children's reverent
instructors, instead of leaving them to be taught God's holiest truths
by vulgar chance or dreadful design.

Do not imagine that innocence necessitates ignorance.

Your child will be far more innocent minded, if you give her the
instruction I suggest, than if you leave her to ungoverned imagination
and unenlightened observation.

Deep in each human entity the sex impulse is planted, and will assert
itself sooner or later.

Ignorance and curiosity lead often to precocious development of the
impulse. By proper care on your part, your child's mind may be kept
normal, innocent, and wholesome.

See to it that you give this important care before you leave.

To Mr. Ray Gilbert

_Attorney at Law, Aged Thirty_

My dear Mr. Gilbert:--Your letter followed me across the ocean, and
chanced to be the first one opened and read in my weighty home mail
to-day. I have lost all trace of you during the last six years, in that
wonderful way people can lose sight of one another in a large city. Once
or twice I heard you had just left some social function as I arrived, or
was expected just as I was leaving, and once, recently, I saw you across
the house at a first night, with a very pretty girl at your side. I
fancy this is the "one woman in the world for you," of whom you speak in
the letter before me--the letter written the evening before your
marriage. How good you are to carry out my request made seven years
ago, and to write me this beautiful letter, after reading over and
burning your former boyish epistle, returning to me my reply.

It is every man's duty to himself, his bride, and the other woman, to
destroy all evidences of past infatuations and affections, before he
enters the new life. It is every woman's duty to do the same--_with a
reservation_. Since men demand so much more of a wife than a wife
demands of a husband, a woman is wise to retain any proof in her
possession that some man has been an honourable suitor for her hand. She
should make no use of such evidence, unless the unaccepted lover
indulges in disrespectful comments or revengeful libels, as some men are
inclined to when the fruit for which they reached is picked by another
hand.

And it is when the grapes are called sour that the evidence may prove
effective of their having been thought sweet and desirable.

It is a curious fact that no woman thinks less of a man for his having
had his vain infatu