ent abroad to nurse the soldiers. I
had gone to the Adirondacks that summer for a rest, and one day on a
motor trip I stopped for luncheon at a farm house, and there I
recognized an old friend from my home town, Laura K----, who was to have
had a brilliant musical career. It was she who had encouraged me to
develop my voice; but I never could have been the great artist that
Laura might have been. A famous impresario had judged her voice to be so
fine--it was a glorious contralto--that he had offered to advance money
for her musical studies abroad. He assured Laura that in three years she
would be a blazing star on the grand opera stage.

That was the last I had heard of my old friend, and here suddenly I
found her, married to a hulking mountaineer, half trapper, half guide.
Here was my wonderful, burning-eyed Laura, who might have had the world
at her feet, a farm drudge taking in summer boarders! How was this
possible?

I spent the afternoon seeking an answer to this riddle. We walked out
into the forest and talked for hours, but whenever I pressed for an
explanation, she halted in confusion. Her mother was old and ill
and--she did not wish to leave her. But, I pointed out, she had never
spoken of this before, she had always cared supremely about her voice,
about her great musical triumph that was to be. Was not that true? Yes,
of course, but--the mountain air was so good for her mother. And she
made other trivial excuses.

Finally, I got the truth as we were strolling home in the twilight and
met her husband slouching along with a gun over his shoulder. As I
caught his sullen, tawny glance and sensed his superb, muscular figure,
I suddenly understood. He nodded curtly and passed on--this cave man!

"_That_ was the reason, Laura, wasn't it?" I whispered.

She looked at me in silence, biting her lips, and blushed furiously.

"Yes," she confessed, "that was the reason."

IS IT A WOMAN'S DUTY TO TELL HER HUSBAND OF PAST TRANSGRESSIONS?

I am not sure what I really believe about this in my deepest soul.
Thousands of women who long to do right will agree with me that it is a
terribly difficult question to answer.

If this were an ideal world where men and women had been purified and
spiritualized to a Christ-like loftiness of soul, one would say yes; but
it is not. A loving wife does not wish her husband to confess to her his
past transgressions, she takes him as he is and is happy to start a new
life with him,