Distrust those who seek to show that there is a discordant note in the old tune of love. Distrust those who claim that the old harmonies have been superseded, that the new chords are less sweet than the old, that the eternal duet which has tinkled and murmured down the ages ever will be ended. The strings and the keys are new, but the tune is the old tune. All the new notes and the new titles, and the new words are but an obbligato, an ornament to the love-motive glowing like a golden strain in the majestic symphony of life--the recurring melody always new, always old; always a surprise, always as certain as spring; so conquering in its power that Miss America, with all of her self-reliance, with all of her assumed superiority to wizard wiles and incantations, falls under the spell and has no regret. She is as willing as ever she was to sit at the feet of the right man. She knows her woman’s power. She is as willing as ever to follow a leader. She only asks that she may elect her leader, not with a ballot, but with the benediction of her love. She knows, with her truest insight, that there is no device of science, nor ideal of sentiment that ever has been or ever can be a substitute in this world for the love of one man for one woman and of that one woman for that man. She sees down the long road of life, alternating patches of sunlight and shadow, chances of trial, certainties of pain, but she sees no cowardly doubt of the nobility and the triumph of her free choice. The snows of time will whiten her hair, and what better fate can she ask from the giver of gifts than that she may sit there, as in the other years, beside her re-elected leader in some hour of peaceful communion; to look back on the paths of their journey, and forward over the long road, recalling the joys and sorrows of the pilgrimage, and realizing here as at the beginning that the stoutest defence against the shafts of fate is the divine ægis of love.... * * * * * [Illustration] The Professor had come into the room girded for one of her intermittent departures into the outer world. I thought then, and it has seemed to me since, that she never presented a more agreeable spectacle than at that moment. She dawned so radiantly there that I never could remember what she wore, save that it was a new gown with a pale becoming pink somewhere. “Professor,” I said, helpless before her discovery of my glance, “woman is the only product of civilization which we might praise to excess, if we ever found the words, without critical resentment.” “You always are either rampantly sentimental,” she said over the last button of her glove, “or remorsefully satirical.”