Deep in each human entity the sex impulse is planted, and will assert itself sooner or later.
Ignorance and curiosity lead often to precocious development of the impulse. By proper care on your part, your child's mind may be kept normal, innocent, and wholesome.
See to it that you give this important care before you leave.
To Mr. Ray Gilbert
Attorney at Law, Aged Thirty
My dear Mr. Gilbert:—Your letter followed me across the ocean, and chanced to be the first one opened and read in my weighty home mail to-day. I have lost all trace of you during the last six years, in that wonderful way people can lose sight of one another in a large city. Once or twice I heard you had just left some social function as I arrived, or was expected just as I was leaving, and once, recently, I saw you across the house at a first night, with a very pretty girl at your side. I fancy this is the "one woman in the world for you," of whom you speak in the letter before me—the letter written the evening before your marriage. How good you are to carry out my request made seven years ago, and to write me this beautiful letter, after reading over and burning your former boyish epistle, returning to me my reply.
It is every man's duty to himself, his bride, and the other woman, to destroy all evidences of past infatuations and affections, before he enters the new life. It is every woman's duty to do the same—with a reservation. Since men demand so much more of a wife than a wife demands of a husband, a woman is wise to retain any proof in her possession that some man has been an honourable suitor for her hand. She should make no use of such evidence, unless the unaccepted lover indulges in disrespectful comments or revengeful libels, as some men are inclined to when the fruit for which they reached is picked by another hand.
And it is when the grapes are called sour that the evidence may prove effective of their having been thought sweet and desirable.