She begins by gaining her confidence.  Very likely she manages to stay all night with her. (That is the time when you tell everything you know, just because it is dark, and then spend the rest of your life wishing you hadn’t.)

Then, when she has the points of the compass, so to speak, she says she will help her dear friend, and the dear friend, not being clever (or she wouldn’t have confided), thinks she is the loveliest girl in the world, and, after promising to send her lover to call in order to be “helped,” she calmly goes to sleep, just as if she has not seen the beginning of the end.

The other girl has observed—­and she is, of course, pretty and attractive.  Girls who do not know anything and who never study are always pretty.  It is only the plain girl who is obliged to be clever.  The first time she sees the lover of her dear friend she begins to laud her to the sky.  She herself is looking so pretty, and she shows off in the most favorable light, while all the time singing her dear friend’s praise with such fatal persistency that she fairly makes him sick of the sound of her name and of her namby-pamby virtues.  Now the man would hardly be human if he did not tell this artless little creature that he had had enough of her dear friend, and that he would much prefer to talk about herself.  Pouts of hurt surprise.  She “thought you were such a friend of hers!” She “only wanted to entertain you by the only subject” she “thought would interest you.”  Presto!  The entering wedge!  She knows it, but the man does not.  He has no idea of being disloyal to his sweetheart, but he is a lost man nevertheless—­lost to the first girl and won by the second.  Won in a perfectly harmless and legitimate way too.  Won while doing her duty, keeping her promise, helping her friend.  Her conscience acquits her.  She has only observed and made use of her cleverness to know that too smooth and easy a course to true love generally gives him to the other girl.

But in reality she has stolen him—­she has committed a real theft.  And, personally, I should prefer to know her had she stolen money.  You can jail a man who steals your watch, but the girl who steals a man’s heart away from his sweetheart walks free, and uncondemned even—­to their shame be it spoken—­by those who know what she has done.

Nobody dares condemn her—­even the friends of the robbed girl, for that presupposes some lack in her charm, and gives publicity to her loss.  The wronged girl, because of her pride and conventionality and civilization, makes no outcry.  A barbarian in her place would have fallen on the robber girl in a fury and scratched her eyes out.  Sometimes I am sorry that our barbaric days are over.

Some of the greatest tragedies in life have come from this disloyalty among girls in their relations with each other.

I have no patience with those people who fall in love with forbidden property and give as their excuse, “I couldn’t help it.”  Such culpable weakness is more dangerous to society than real wickedness.