e. This is gracious and knightly in the lover, but a married man,
the head of a family, must be careful to maintain his position.

Cases of reformation by marriage are few and far between, and men more
often die of wounded conceit than broken hearts. "Men have died and
worms have eaten them, but not for love," save on the stage and in the
stories women cry over.

[Sidenote: "The Other Woman"]

"The other woman" is the chief bugbear of life. On desert islands and in
a very few delightful books, her baneful presence is not. The girl a man
loves with all his heart can see a long line of ghostly ancestors, and
requires no opera-glass to discern through the mists of the future a
procession of possible posterity. It is for this reason that men's ears
are tried with the eternal, unchanging: "Am I the only woman you ever
loved?" and "Will you always love me?"

The woman who finally acquires legal possession of a man is haunted by
the shadowy predecessors. If he is unwary enough to let her know another
girl has refused him, she develops a violent hatred for this inoffensive
maiden. Is it because the cruel creature has given pain to her lord? His
gods are not her gods--if he has adored another woman.

These two are mutually "other women," and the second one has the best of
it, for there is no thorn in feminine flesh like the rejected lover who
finds consolation elsewhere. It may be exceedingly pleasant to be a
man's first love, but she is wise beyond books who chooses to be his
last, and it is foolish to spend mental effort upon old flames, rather
than in watching for new ones, for Caesar himself is not more utterly
dead than a man's dead love.

Women are commonly supposed to worry about their age, but Father Time is
a trouble to men also. The girl of twenty thinks it absurd for women to
be concerned about the matter, but the hour eventually comes when she
regards the subject with reverence akin to awe. There is only one terror
in it--the dreadful nines.

[Sidenote: Scylla and Charybdis]

"Twenty-nine!" Might she not as well be thirty? There is little choice
between Scylla and Charybdis. Twenty-nine is the hour of reckoning for
every woman, married, engaged, or unattached.

The married woman felicitates herself greatly, unless a tall daughter of
nine or ten walks abroad at her side. The engaged girl is safe--she
rejoices in the last hours of her lingering girlhood and hems table
linen with more resignation. The unattach