s a wielder of
the barbed word.

Miss Rowland is balanced skilfully upon that same slender trapeze, doing
a very deft bow-and-arrow act, her archery of a high order.

She wields a wicked bow, a kindly bow, a swift, a sure, a ductile bow.

Matrimony is her favorite target (so was it Bombo's and Herrick's and
even political Parnell had his shot at it) and her little winged arrows
are often bitingly pointed with philosophy, satire, wit and sometimes
just a touch of good old home-brew American hokum.

For this wise woman with the high-spirited bow behind her arrow, these
little pages speak eloquently.

FANNIE HURST.

[Illustration]

OVERTURE

Would you your sweetheart's secret seek to spell?
There are so many little ways to tell!
A hair, perhaps, shall prove him false or true--
A single hair upon his coat lapel!

[Illustration]

PRELUDE

THE sweetest part of a kiss is the moment just before taking.

Love is misery--sweetened with imagination, salted with tears, spiced
with doubt, flavored with novelty, and swallowed with your eyes shut.

Marriage is the miracle that transforms a kiss from a pleasure into a
duty, and a lie from a luxury into a necessity.

A husband is what is left of a lover, after the nerve has been
extracted.

A man's heart is like a barber shop in which the cry is always, "NEXT!"

The discovery of rice-powder on his coat-lapel makes a college-boy
swagger, a bachelor blush, and a married man tremble.

It takes one woman twenty years to make a man of her son--and another
woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him.

By the time a man has discovered that he is in love with a woman, she is
usually so fagged out waiting for the phenomenon, that she is ready to
topple right over into his arms from sheer exhaustion.

A man always asks for "just one kiss"--because he knows that, if he can
get that, the rest will come without asking.

Somehow, the moment a man has surrendered the key of his heart to a
woman, he begins to think about changing the lock.

There are only two ages, at which a man faces the altar without a
shudder; at twenty when he doesn't know what's happening to him--and at
eighty when he doesn't care.

[Illustration]

THE REFRAIN

[Illustration]

THERE'S so much saint in the worst of them,
And so much devil in the best of