Bachelors take note! A woman--new style--who has knocked about over half the world and sown a mild crop of the delectable cereal will prove a far better wife, a more cheery friend and faithful comrade than the girl _of more or less the same type_ whose first experience you are, and who will make enormous claims on your love and patience by reason of her utter ignorance of men. You will possibly even have to live up to an ideal founded on novel-reading, and that you will find very wearing, my friend! The experienced woman knows men so thoroughly, she will expect nothing more of you than you can give her, and will appreciate your virtues to the utmost and make the best of your vices. ‘But she has flirted so outrageously,’ you say? Well, so much the better, she is less likely to do it after marriage. ‘But, hang it all, she has been kissed by other men,’ you say? Well then, she has no need for further experiences of this kind and is not likely ever to give her lips again to others once she is yours. . . . How can you be sure? That is one of the innumerable risks of marriage. How can _she_ be sure that _your_ last crop is sown, still less reaped? . . . Oh, my dear man, you really make me very angry--do for heaven’s sake try and get away from conventional ideas of right and wrong! Judge things _for yourself_, and as they would seem, say, at the edge of an active volcano! . . . All the things we fuss so much about would doubtless quickly assume their real value if viewed from this perilous situation. And even in the sad cases where a woman has sown real wild oats in the man’s sense of the word, how different the little moral rules and regulations which we keep for these occasions would appear in the face of an immediate and violent death. I heard not long ago of a very sad story which bears this out. A man very narrowly escaped death from drowning, shortly after he had broken his engagement with a girl he genuinely loved, on her confessing to him that, many years before, she had once yielded to the importunities of a passionate lover. I do not know what were his emotions in the awful moment when the waters closed over him, and he was experiencing that horrible fight for breath which those who have known it describe as the most terrible sensation conceivable. Apparently his hairbreadth escape from death tore from his eyes the swathings of conventional opinion with which he had been blinded. Instead of regarding himself as a deeply wronged man he realised that he had behaved horribly to the unfortunate girl, who had thus been doubly outraged by his sex. He sought her at once and begged to be taken back again, but she happened to be a woman of some spirit, and she refused to trust herself to a man of such narrow views, and given to such harsh judgment.