On the other hand it may be wrong, as it has been oft before.  Many a woman has jumped out of the frying pan of one marriage into the fire of another.

Only time will tell.  If this new love is the “soul mate” she thinks, the attraction will be all the stronger and steadier in a year or two from now.  If he is not the soul mate she thinks him, the attraction will wane.

I know women who, under similar conditions, have elected to wait; women whose consciences would not allow them to leave a kind husband or young children for the sake of gratifying their passion for another man. I have known these same women to despise a year or two later, the men they had thought themselves passionately and everlastingly in love with.  They have never got over thanking whatever gods there be that they were saved from that rash step.  I have known many cases of this kind, and have received many letters of fervent thanks from both men and women who followed my private counsel to let time prove the new attraction before severing old ties and making new ones.

And I must say that not one who waited but has said to me, “I am glad I waited”; whilst many who did not wait have bitterly regretted.

A love affair is emotional insanity.  Lovers are insane; not in fit condition to decide their own actions.  The state of “falling in love” is moon-madness.  For the time being the lover’s sense of justice, his reason, his judgment, is distorted by reflections from another personality.  This is especially so in the woman’s case, for the reason that she is generally a creature of untrained impulse, instead of reasoning will.

There is that recent case of the beautiful and beloved Princess Louise who ran away from her royal husband.  She thought she loved Monsieur Giron so devotedly that she could bear anything for the sake of being with him.  And surely she was miserable enough in her old environment.  But when it came to the reality she could not bear the consequences.  She wanted her children; her proud spirit winced at the snubs she got; she longed a little for the old life; and familiarity with her soul mate revealed the knowledge that he was not all soul.  She flunked miserably and went home to her sick child.  You see, she was literally love-sick.  Her mind was disordered; a life spent with her soul mate loomed to her so large and dazzling that all other things were as nothing.  She couldn’t for the time being see straight.  She was literally insane.

If she had only waited until the new wore off her passion!  Waited until she saw things in their proper proportions and relations to each other; until she was sure she could live the life made inevitable by her change.

That is the trouble;—­love-sick-ness blinds her to the truth.  When she wakes up by experience of the truth, she wishes she hadn’t.