Did you ever notice that, as the heat of midsummer opens up the pores, the youthful human seems to become exposed to curious and violent attacks of sentimentality? It's a fact. All the world recognizes that the Summer Girl is especially a prey to this insidious complaint; that no matter how modest, reserved and circumspect she may be as a Winter Girl, when she breaks her Summer chrysalis all the butterfly nature within her is given wing, inward and outward restraints drop from her almost as inevitably as her cold weather clothing, and she lets herself dance along on the soft breeze of sentiment with the lightness and freedom of a bit of thistledown. This odd Summer bewitchment might be immensely funny were it not for the fact that its consequences, in thousands of cases, are serious, not to say tragic. The comic papers depend upon this dog-day epidemic of silliness as an unfailing source of excruciatingly amusing jokes and pictures. Summer resort and seashore flirtations--what would the "comics" do without them when the mercury creeps high in the slender tube of the thermometer? In the language of the sportsman, the Summer is everywhere recognized as the "open season" for the hunting of hearts and the pursuit of romance. The girl who is her own chaperone and protector allows herself a latitude of unconventionally in the period of Summer outings, of vacations and excursions, of moonshine and frolic, which she would not think of permitting herself at another season. Romance is in the air, and even the careful and well-reared girl finds herself under its spell. What is the result? Thousands of half-baked romances ending in Gretna Green marriages are the invariable harvest of this season of Summer silliness; marriages which bring suffering and bitter repentance and a tragic climax in the divorce courts--if they do not come to a worse ending. Wherever the prow of an excursion boat pushes its way through the waters, wherever crowds of young people mingle in the pursuit of pleasure, there are hatched the romances which spell heartbreak and unhappiness. Every Summer furnishes thousands upon thousands of these cases. They are "down in the books"--one entry in the books at the Gretna Green, the runaway marriage headquarters, and the other in the divorce courts.