thing to manage, from our point of view. It is a fearful strain to
live up to it. In fact, nobody can do it. But I never could see why
you had to stick to one or the other. Why can't you mix the two?

Ideal love is a beautiful thing to think about or to live in for a few
weeks or months--according to your temperament. It cannot be equalled
for the first part of an engagement or the honeymoon. But it is like
going to the theatre and seeing the grandeur of the old gray castle,
and the perpetual moonlight, and the devoted love of the satin duchess
for the velvet duke. You know that it is just acting, and that the
villain is not really going to swim the moat with his band of steel
warriors, and burn the castle, and capture the duchess and marry her
by force. Yet I love to pretend. I dearly love to take two
pocket-handkerchiefs with me and sop them both--and I would like to
cry out loud, only I never do; but I always have to pull my veil down
and feel my way out of the theatre. I love to throw myself into it,
and it always annoys me when the acting is so bad that I cannot. If
any man sees any moral in that, let him heed it, and believe that I am
only one of ten thousand other girls who would like to throw ourselves
into the illusion of it only your acting is so bad that we cannot.

If men would only realize that the material side is what we girls care
the least for. Pray do not think, just because you have built us
Colonial houses, and have our clothes made for us, and never allow
butchers' bills to annoy us, that you have done your whole duty by us.
It never occurs to most of us who have those dear American men for
husbands and lovers that we ever really could become cold or hungry.
You would be very unhappy if you thought anybody belonging to you did
not have all the clothes she wanted, and the best in the market. But
you think it is a huge joke when we say that we are mentally cold and