Jealousy and distrust have never yet won a doubting heart.  Bitterness never accomplishes miracles which sweetness fails to do.  Too often men and women spend their time in wondering why they are not loved, trying various schemes and pitiful experiments, and passing by the simple method of trying to be lovable and unconscious of self.

[Sidenote:  “The Milk of Human Kindness”]

“The milk of human kindness” seldom produces cream, but there is only one way by which love may be won or kept.  Perfection means a continual shifting of standards and must ever be unattainable, but the man or woman who is simply lovable will be wholly taken into other hearts—­faults and all.

Now and then a man’s love is hopeless, from causes which are innate and beyond control.  Sometimes regret strikes deep and lasts for more than a day, as in the pages of the story books which women love to read.  Sometimes, too, a tender-hearted woman, seeing far into the future, will do her best to spare a fellow-creature pain.

[Sidenote:  The Wine of Conquest]

But this is the exception, rather than the rule.  The average woman regards a certain number of proposals as but a just tribute to her own charm.  Sometimes she sees what she has unconsciously done when it is too late to retreat, but even then, though pity, regret, and honest pain may result from it, there is one effect more certain still—­the intoxication of the wine of conquest, against which no woman is proof.

Love Letters:  Old and New

[Illustration]

Love Letters:  Old and New

[Sidenote:  The Average Love Letter]

The average love letter is sufficient to make a sensitive spinster weep, unless she herself is in love and the letter be addressed to her.  The first stage of the tender passion renders a man careless as to his punctuation, the second seriously affects his spelling, and in the last period of the malady, his grammar develops locomotor ataxia.  The single blessedness of school-teachers is largely to be attributed to this cause.

A real love letter is absolutely ridiculous to everyone except the writer and the recipient.  A composition, which repeats the same term of endearment thirteen times on a page, has certainly no particular claim to literary art.

When a man writes a love letter, dated, and fully identified by name and address, there is no question but that he is in earnest.  A large number of people consider nothing so innocently entertaining as love letters, read in a court-room, with due attention to effect, by the counsel for the other side.

Affairs of that kind are given scarlet headlines in the saffron journals, and if the letters are really well done, it means the sale of an “extra.”  No man can hope to write anything which will possess such general interest as his love letters.  If Shakespeare had written voluminously to his sweetheart—­to any of his sweethearts—­and the letters should be found by this generation, what a hue and cry would be raised over his peaceful ashes!