"And behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet and anointed them with ointment." How stale, flat and unprofitable the modern stories of semi- repentant prostitutes beside that pathetic passage, which shears down into the very soul--penetrates to the profoundest depths of the sacred Lake of Tears! And yet this ultra-orthodox age--which would suppress the ICONOCLAST if it could for poking fun at Poll Parrot preachers--has not become crazed over Mary Magdalen-- has not so much as named a canal-boat or a cocktail for her. Du Maurier says of his heroine: "With her it was lightly come and lightly go and never come back again. . . . Sheer gayety of heart and genial good fellowship, the difficulty of saying nay to earnest pleading . . . so little did she know of love's heartaches and raptures and torments and clingings and jealousies," etc. A woman who had never been in love, yet confessed to criminal intimacy with three men--and was not yet at the end of her string! Not even the pride of dress, the scourge of need, the fire-whips of passion to urge her on, she sinned, as the Yankees would say, simply "to be a-doin' "--broke the Seventh Commandment "more in a frolicsome spirit of camaraderie than anything else." That's the way we used to kill people in Texas. Still I opine that when a young woman gets so awfully jolly that she distributes her favors around promiscuously just to put people in a good humor, she's a shaky piece of furniture to make a fad of--a doubtful example to be commended from the pulpit to America's young daughters. The French enthusiasts once crowned a courtesan in Notre Dame as Goddess of Reason and worshiped her; but I was hardly prepared to see the American people enthrone another as Goddess of Respectability and become hysterical in their devotion. I am no he-prude. I have probably said as many kindly things of fallen womanhood as Du Maurier himself, but I dislike to see a rotten drab deified. I dislike to see a great publishing house like that of Harper & Bros. so indifferent to decency, so careless of moral consequences, that, for the sake of gain, it will turn loose upon this land the foul liaisons of the French capital. I dislike to see the mothers of the next generation of Americans trying to "make up" to resemble the counterfeit presentment of a brazen bawd. It indicates that our entire social system is sadly in need of fumigation--such as Sodom and Gomorrah received.