physiology and sheer nonsense which under our system of
education distorts and either alarms or inflames the imaginations
of girls and boys where the clean, simple truth would at least
enlighten them. Susan listened with increasing amazement.

"Well, do you understand?" Ruth ended. "How we come into the
world--and what marriage means?"

"I don't believe it," declared Susan. "It's--awful!" And she
shivered with disgust.

"I tell you it's true," insisted Ruth. "I thought it was awful
when I first heard--when Lottie Wright took me out in their
orchard, where nobody could listen, and told me what their cook
had told her. But I've got kind of used to it."

"But it--it's so, then; my mother did marry my father," said Susan.

"No. She let him betray her. And when a woman lets a man betray
her without being married by the preacher or somebody, why,
she's ruined forever."

"But doesn't marriage mean where two people promise to love each
other and then betray each other?"

"If they're married, it isn't betraying," explained Ruth. "If
they're not, it is betraying." Susan reflected, nodded slowly.
"I guess I understand. But don't you see it was my father who was
the disgrace? He was the one that promised to marry and didn't."