This woman now waits and watches in her mountain home for his return.  She knows the coyotes and buzzards picked the scant flesh from his starved frame, but she says:  “He promised he would come back to me, and he will.  I am waiting for him here.”

This woman writes me long letters from her solitude, telling me of her hopes and plans.  Just why all the cranks in the United States should write me letters, I do not know, but they do—­perhaps there is a sort o’ fellow-feeling.  This woman may write letters to others, just as she does to me.  Of this I do not know, but surely I would not thus make public the heart-tragedy told me in a private letter, were it not that the woman herself has printed a pamphlet, setting forth her faith and veiling only those things into which it is not our right to pry.

This Mary Magdalene believes her lover was the Chosen Son of God, and that the Father will reclothe the Son in a new garment of flesh and send him back to his beloved.  So she watches and waits, and dresses herself to receive him, and at night places a lighted lantern in the window to guide the way.

She watches and waits.

Other women wait for footsteps that will never come, and listen for a voice that will never be heard.  All round the world there is a sisterhood of such.  Some, being wise, lose themselves in loving service to others—­in useful work.  But this woman, out in the wilds of New Mexico, hugs her sorrow to her heart, and feeds her passion by recounting it, and watches away the leaden hours, crying aloud to all who will listen:  “He is not dead—­he is not dead! he will come back to me!  He promised it—­he will come back to me!  This long, dreary waiting is only a test of my loyalty and love!  I will be patient, for he will come back to me!  He will come back to me!”

This world would be a sorry place if most men conducted their lives on the Robert Burns plan.  Burns was affectionate, tender, generous and kind; but he was not wise.  He never saw the future, nor did he know that life is a sequence, and that if you do this, it is pretty sure to lead to that.  His loves were largely of the earth.

Excess was a part of his wayward, undisciplined nature; and that constant tendency to put an enemy in his mouth to steal away his brains, bound him at last, hand and foot.  His old age could never have been frosty, but kindly—­it would have been babbling, irritable, senile, sickening.  Death was kind and reaped him young.  Sex was the rock on which Robert Burns split.  He seemed to regard pleasure-seeking as the prime end of life, and in this he was not so very far removed from the prevalent “civilized” society notion of marriage.  But it is a phantasmal idea, and makes a mock of marriage, serving the satirist his excuse.

To a great degree the race is yet barbaric, and as a people we fail utterly to touch the hem of the garment of Divinity.  We have been mired in the superstition that sex is unclean, and therefore honesty and free expression in love matters have been tabued.