oking, or
drinking cocktails, or even coffee. I swore off coffee six weeks ago.
During the first week I was nearly crazy for it--had headaches, felt
rotten, but I stuck it out. In the second week it was much easier for me
not to take coffee. At the end of a month the habit was established and
now I have no more craving for coffee. If I leave it alone for six
months the chances are that nothing will ever make me drink coffee
again, especially if I hypnotize myself with the idea that coffee is bad
for my heart action, that I'm a nice little hero to have cut it out and
that now I am going to live to be over ninety. You see?

"'Now then, the drift of all this is that the habit of virtue in women
if it really was an on-the-level habit that they believed in with all
their souls and would fight for with all their strength, would be
utterly and absolutely unbreakable--no man could overcome it. The only
reason why men in all times and in all lands have overcome women's
virtue is because women themselves have never attached the importance to
it that they pretend to attach. That isn't a very gallant speech, but it
is true.'"

As I said, I became angry at Kendall's accusations and refused to
continue the discussion, but if I were to answer the poet now, after my
wider experience of life, especially after my sufferings, I should feel
obliged to acknowledge that he struck a hard blow at feminine
complacency. The trouble with women is that there is an increasing
tendency among them, especially among those who live in cities full of
pleasures and excitements, to compromise with evil, to go as near the
danger line as possible, so long as they do not cross it. And this
cowardly, dallying virtue is almost no virtue at all. There was a time
when women prayed sincerely: "Lead us not into temptation"; now it seems
as if they pray to be led into temptation, with just this reservation:
_that they may come out of it unscathed. Demi-vierges!_

I have watched many attractive women treading the primrose path and I
have seen that it always leads them to unhappiness. Not that they are
disgraced or openly degraded--life goes on with many of them very much
as before, but gradually their faces change, their souls change. They
could have done so much better; they could have been useful, respected
and self-respecting figures in the world _through loving service_. After
all, life is very short and the only things that really matter are the
things that