Beauty and the Beast may be a pretty fairy-tale, but in the realism of practical life it assumes the guise of a tragedy that makes the looker-on shudder with disgustful pity.  My heart aches when I think of the women who began the work of reformation with hope and laid it down with despair at the end of a life that made them “turn weary arms to death” with a sigh of welcome.  On the table before me stands the portrait of one such woman.  When she was a merry-hearted girl, she fell in love with a handsome, brilliant young fellow, whose only failing was a dangerous fondness for liquor.  He loved her deeply—­better than anything else in the world—­except drink.  Nevertheless, he promised to overcome even this passion for her sake.  During the month immediately preceding their marriage, he came twice into her presence intoxicated.  In vain did her family plead and protest.  Her only answer was: 

“Harry cannot keep straight without some one to help him.  I must marry him now.  He needs me!”

Two years after her marriage she died of a broken heart, whispering at the last to a dear friend that she “was not sorry to go, but would be thankful life was over if she were only sure that her year-old baby would not be left to Harry’s care.”

Yet he was in most respects tender and considerate.  The trouble was that his devotion to her remained at the point at which it stood when he became her husband.  The habit of intemperance grew.

Suppose that, added to this great fault, had been others still more vicious.  Had his been a coarse brutal nature, would not the idea of reformation have been still more hopeless?

A woman, in tying herself for life to an unprincipled man who has yielded to the dictates of sin year after year, forgets that he has lost to a great extent his better nature and is now hardly responsible for his actions.  The spirit may indeed be willing, but the flesh is lamentably weak.  The appetites that have been long indulged do not relinquish their claims after only a few months’ restraint, and when the girl for whose sake they have been repressed is won, they will return to the swept and garnished room, and the last end of their victim will be worse than the first.

I often wonder what a good, pure woman promises herself when she proposes to entwine her clean life with one that is scarred, seamed and blackened.  Evade the truth as she may, there are but two courses for her to pursue.  She must either live a lonely life apart from her husband’s, frowning down, or silently showing disapproval of his habits, or she must, to preserve peace and the semblance of happiness, bring herself down to his level and become even less delicate and more degraded than he.  For is not a coarse woman always more abhorrent than a coarse man?  There are the instincts of her entire moral and physical nature to be cast aside before she can descend to vulgarity.  In the one case her husband will hate her, while in the other she will lose his respect and will despise herself.