turning over a clean page. She only asks that he be loyal
and faithful in the future. And if she is ready to give him similar
loyalty and faithfulness, if she has sincerely repented of any sinful
act, is not that sufficient? Why must she risk the destruction of their
happiness by a revelation that will do no good to anyone? Why must she
give her husband needless pain?

_And yet--_

While the vast majority of women will agree that such feminine reticence
about past wrong-doing is justifiable, the truth, as I have come to see
it, is that, in so agreeing, women must subscribe to a creed of
deliberate deception. A man marries a woman whom he believes to be
virtuous, a woman whom he might refuse to marry if he knew that she were
not virtuous. And this woman does nothing to disabuse him of his error.
Is that right? She allows her husband to keep a certain good opinion of
her that is not justified. No matter how excellent her motive may be,
the fact remains that this marriage rests upon an insecure foundation,
upon an implied falsehood. Thousands of plays and stories have been
constructed on this theme, and they usually end unhappily.

Suppose a man who had been in prison should marry a woman who was
ignorant of this cloud on his life, trusting to chance that his criminal
record would never be discovered? The two cases are somewhat parallel.
What would the woman say if she learned later that she had unwittingly
married an ex-convict? Would she not prefer that he had told her the
truth before he married her?

On the other hand it may be argued that a woman's sin, being presumably
the fault of some man, may be properly expiated, in part at least, by
some other man. But that does not dispose of the difficulty that _a
woman who conceals past indiscretions from her husband is condemned to
live a lie_.

One deception almost invariably leads to another deception until a
whole chain or net of equivocations, ruses, trickeries, is established
with the hideous possibility of some shocking divorce scandal, possibly
years later when innocent children may be the sufferers.

Even if such disaster is averted and the truth is never revealed, even
if all goes well apparently through happy married years, yet the poison
of deceit may work a spiritual disaster in this woman--such a disaster
as overwhelmed me--or it may bring about a lowering of moral standards
in a woman, a stifling of religious life, that will have sinister and
far-reachin