All love is a gas, and it takes either loneliness, strength of
character, or religion to liquefy it into a condition to be ladled out
of us, one to another. There is a certain dangerously volatile state of
it; and occasionally people, especially of opposite sexes, try to
administer it to each other in that form, with asphyxiation resulting to
both hearts. And I'm willing to confess that it is generally a woman's
fault when such an accident occurs. That is, it is a mistake of her
nature, not one of intent. But she is learning!

Also when a woman is created, the winds have wooed star-dust, rose-dew,
peach-down, and a few flint-shavings into a whirlwind of deviltry, and
the world at large looks on in wonder and sore amazement, as well as
breathless interest. I know, because I am one, and have just been waked
up by the gyrations of the cyclone; and I'm deeply confounded. I don't
like it, and wish I could have slept longer, but Fate and Jane Mathers
decreed otherwise. At least Jane decreed, and Fate seems so far helpless
to controvert the decree.

I might have known that when this jolly, easy-going old Fate of mine,
which I inherited from a lot of indolent, pleasure-loving Harpeth Valley
Tennesseans, let me pack up my graduating thesis, my B.S., and some
delicious frocks, and go off to Paris for a degree from the Beaux Arts
in Architecture, we would be caught up with by some kind of Nemesis or
other, and put in our place in the biological and ethnological scheme of
existence. Yes, Fate and I are placed, and Jane did it.

Also, I am glad, now that I know what is going to happen to me, that I
had last week on shipboard, with Richard Hall bombarding my cardiac