But these women who are neither "stars or the lower stratum," who study and labor, even though the labor be light through being one of love for their profession, who give a refinement and a sweetness to the many little dramas that appeal to critique and common folk alike, who speak to us of wife and sister and mother and sweetheart, and whose voices are as sweet and gestures as gentle and personalities as refined as are those of our own home women nestling safe in the firelight of our ingle-nook--these women are not immoral in a ratio of "ten to one." And with them, as with our home women, it is not their sense of morality that is their greatest safe-guard. It is their sense of refinement. It is a mistake to think that only Christian and moral women are virtuous. "Passion leaps o'er cold decree," and Christian precepts and moral teaching are cold and distant things when the blood leaps like molton lava through heart and brain. With Marguerite telling her beads, the prayers become but a babble of empty sound on her lips when the sweet poison of her lover's teachings crept through ear and heart and opened to her wondering, frightened dreams a Paradise of sense and sound and sweetness and dreamy, swooning loveliness before which her pictured pearl and golden heaven waxed chill and distant and austere. Prayers did not save Francesca from the sweet torment of her Passion and her Purgatory. Prayers save but rarely, for they are to darkness and to mystery that give back only the awful weight of silence--silence under which the frantic heart struggles and stifles as beneath a pall. Prayers reach out to an infinity that is shrouded always, but the lover's lips are sweet and the caress is close and the arms are warm and human. What wonder if the brain forgets when the heart thirsts and pleads? What wonder if the reason waver and faint when the winged god nestles close in the breast? What woman if the woman wake and thrill and "answers to the touch of one musician's hand" as an instrument that is silent till the master touch sweep the strings? What wonder if the marble warm and waken and throb to quick life beneath the passion of Pygmalion's kiss? What wonder if women love with an answering love if their God have so created? And what wonder if their prayer to him faint on their lips beneath the surging diapason of the waking heart beneath? If he so created, what then? If he "saw them made and said 'twas good," what then? If he made love chief, to deity and then destroy, its ecstacy blending with agony "as swells and swoons, across the wold the tinkling of the camel's bell," what then? If he made the greatest thing in the world and life speaks to life as a magnet to the pole, what then? Can you break that strong, silent current by a breathed invocation? Did not the Man cry from the cross in his exquisite agony, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!" And if his divine faith fainted on the threshold of his kingdom,