There is an ignoble forgiveness that is based on love of material advantages--love of money. There are women who tolerate faithless husbands because they are too cowardly or indolent to fight the battle of life alone. What would they do if they left their sheltered homes? Who would provide comforts and luxuries? How would they dress themselves? How would they live? Shall it be by working? But they hate to work. They have never learned to work. It was partly as a defense against this woman helplessness that I took up trained nursing while Julian was still alive. A still more degrading forgiveness is based on sensuality. There are women married to brutes of husbands who will endure every humiliation, surrendering all their fine ideals and high purposes rather than leave these coarse mates. I first realized this just before I went abroad to nurse the soldiers. I had gone to the Adirondacks that summer for a rest, and one day on a motor trip I stopped for luncheon at a farm house, and there I recognized an old friend from my home town, Laura K----, who was to have had a brilliant musical career. It was she who had encouraged me to develop my voice; but I never could have been the great artist that Laura might have been. A famous impresario had judged her voice to be so fine--it was a glorious contralto--that he had offered to advance money for her musical studies abroad. He assured Laura that in three years she would be a blazing star on the grand opera stage. That was the last I had heard of my old friend, and here suddenly I found her, married to a hulking mountaineer, half trapper, half guide. Here was my wonderful, burning-eyed Laura, who might have had the world at her feet, a farm drudge taking in summer boarders! How was this possible? I spent the afternoon seeking an answer to this riddle. We walked out into the forest and talked for hours, but whenever I pressed for an explanation, she halted in confusion. Her mother was old and ill and--she did not wish to leave her. But, I pointed out, she had never spoken of this before, she had always cared supremely about her voice, about her great musical triumph that was to be. Was not that true? Yes, of course, but--the mountain air was so good for her mother. And she made other trivial excuses. Finally, I got the truth as we were strolling home in the twilight and met her husband slouching along with a gun over his shoulder. As I caught his sullen, tawny glance and sensed his superb, muscular figure, I suddenly understood. He nodded curtly and passed on--this cave man! "_That_ was the reason, Laura, wasn't it?" I whispered. She looked at me in silence, biting her lips, and blushed furiously. "Yes," she confessed, "that was the reason." IS IT A WOMAN'S DUTY TO TELL HER HUSBAND OF PAST TRANSGRESSIONS? I am not sure what I really believe about this in my deepest soul. Thousands of women who long to do right will agree with me that it is a terribly difficult question to answer.