Newspaper Page Text
CONFESSIONS OF A WIFE
PAULA REALIZES LAWTON IS NOT THE MAN
"Jeff turned Dale, and truly. Mar
gie," said Paula, "I felt awfully sorry
for him and for myself. - I seemed
to understand that minute that Jeff's
love was the kind that could only
come to a girl once that I was
throwing away the purest gold for a
kind of sentimental dross, and yet
such is the silly contrariness of a
woman's emotional nature that my
heart did not skip a beat while he was
talking to me.
"All the while the words I spoke
to Earnest in the play as Elga were
ringing in my ears, almost forming
themselves on my lips a girl's heart
is no different from a woman's heart.
You say that I cannot be sure of my
self perhaps not but at least I am
sure that I love you that for your
own amusement, during an idle mo
ment, you have made me love you
you have turned my girl heart into a
woman heart. And now what are
you going to do with it?
"'You say that you love me, but
you are not sure that I would always
love a man so much older than I
that the time would surely come
when I would turn' and hate you for
taking me at my word now.
" 'Oh, my dear, my dear, my heart
is old enough to know that, did you
really love me, you would never think
of that you would take me at any
price, under any circumstances, and
you would feel perfectly sure that
you could hold me as long as you
loved me, which you would be per
fectly confident in your own mind
would be forever. For Earnest, man's
love is the most arrogant, most-self-deceiving
thing in the whole world.
It receives itself into thinking that it
can do anything, and more than all
the rest it deceives itself into think
ing that if all the things of which we
know or can conceive in this world,
it alone is eternal.
" 'You look surprised that I, just a
little girl as you have often called me,
know so much about love, and I am
surprised that you, man of the wona
that you are, do not know when a
woman loves a man she is not con
tent that just her senses shall be
sjitisfipH Rhfi hprfns immediately to
ask "Why?" the world-old question,
the world-old longing, that is never
sated.
" 'Earnest, I love you now take
me and if you really love me you can
hold me until death do us part and
after '
"That was my speech in "The
Woman He Chose,' Margie," said
Paula, "and it kept coming to me
while Jeff was talking, and somehow
I knew that the end of the play was
true of me on and off the stage that
the man Elga loved was not worthy
and the man she gave up for him was
worth a million of him.
"Jefferson Perrygreen, sitting there
across the table, clean-limbed, clear
eyed, well-educated, high-minded,
young and rich what perverse fate
made me caress surreptitiously the
orchids at my belt at every chance?
"Earnest Lawton, blase, cynical,
selfish, egotistical, a manof burnt-out
passions and more or less neurotic
mind there was no comparison be
tween th two, and I knew it
"But such is the perversity of hu
man nature that at that very mo
ment I would rather have been sup
ping with Earnest at some bohemian
place than dining with Jeff amid all
the splendor at Sherry's. And yet I
also knew I would never have happi
ness unalloyed with Earnest, but 'I
asked myself: 'Does anyone in all
the world ever find unalloyed happi
ness?'" (To Be Continued)
o o
Since being happy makes one fat
that's why it's hard for a fat person
to get thin. When they lose a few
pounds they're so happy hey add on
the weight they lost, Dr, Izzy Rite,
