believe it? Oh, very well; some day this madness, that is
rearoused by a faded violet or a time-stained ribbon, may enter into
even your life. But I hope you may be spared it.

A man? Ah, how often when he has grappled sturdily with duty, with
honor--how often has the love token, with divine promise, stared him
in the face and cried like Clarimonde returned from the grave:

If thou wilt be mine, I shall make thee happier than God himself
in His paradise; the angels themselves will be jealous of thee.
I am Beauty--I am Youth--I am Life--come to me!--together we
shall be Love. Our lives will flow on like a dream--in one
eternal kiss.

Has enough been said to cause you to wonder why no one has written the
history of the love token? Such a stately and wondrous work it should
make! Why has no one honored it with even the rambling lightness of an
essay? Elia could have done that much--and Leigh Hunt have done it
even better. Lamb, it is true, has talked with quaint airiness of
valentines, which are a sort of love token, and has admitted, poor old
bachelor! that the postman's knock on St. Valentine's Day brings
"visions of love, of Cupids, of Hymens!--delightful, eternal
commonplaces; which, having been, will always be."

But this, while, perhaps, the essence of the love token, is not its
history, and I shall hazard a guess as to why that is not written. The
reason is that it is not only the cherished token of a woman's love,
but is also the irritating reminder of her equality with man. At the
altar she unhesitatingly swears to love eternally--an oath sometimes
beyond her power to keep; but in increasing numbers she refuses to
make the promise of obedience--a promise always possible to fulfill.
With the freedom that in this generation is hers, even before
marriage, has come a fierce desire for monopoly, and to such a one the
token of a single love has lost its tenderness. She keeps such tokens
by the score, with all the pride of a Sioux warrior in his array of
scalps. The man lovingly cherishes a single one. To her he is an
incident in life's story. To him she is its climax.

With this increased freedom permitted in woman's conduct, the love
tokens she gives have become even more treasured, for the liberty she
now possesses has turned her love tokens into fertilizers of a
slumbering jealousy. As they were unknown when woman had no choice,
was bought or captured, so they became again unknown in the one-