Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 January 1913 — ONLY PROPER REVENGE [ARTICLE]

ONLY PROPER REVENGE

REBUKING THE PRESUMPTION OF THE' MARRIED WOMAN. —— Too Many Seek to Probe Into the Heart Secrets of Their Less Fortunate testers, and Deserve Severe Treatment. A good many inferences might be made about her own experience In preserving the tender passion with a live husband. To write so feelingly of the preservative qualities of a dead lover naturally suggests that a living spouse gave her cause to do some cobbling at the run-down heels of sentiment. But—that did not excuse her Impertinence! Nothing gave her the right in the sight of God, man or other women; nothing excused her. A cowboy with a record for‘men he had killed finally met his match. His admiring friends were “stumped” to find an epitaph to put upon the montffhent they builded him. At last they hail, graven there in chaste and forceful simplicity, “He done hla durnedest.” I, too, faltering before the futility of language as a means of expressing just what the married woman does who asks the impertinent question, say, “She does —” It isn’t necessary to repeat the quotation. Why, the married woman who does it is a social ghoul cavorting heedlessly, wantonly, cruelly, hideously on the grave of dead hopes, gouging her question into the body of lost love! Before she married she was like other women thoroughfarers. Afterward, seated in the matrimonial automobile, she dashes headlong among the ones who still walk and knocks the very breath out of them. Apparently, she thinks the marriage machine is meant to send single pedestrians scurrying’ and dodging. Anyway, that’s the use she makes of It. x

If married women forget how it feels to be unmarried and asked why, here is telling them! It feels painful and lonely and sad. It takes sweetness and courage and an enormous amount of the good, garden variety of sense to bear up gracefully. And when Idle or thoughtloss curiosity goes digging and snaggllng and punching about in the sore and sacred places of the- heart, the suffering and the rage it creates is too awful to mention. _ What really ought to happen to these inquiring matrons is this: When one asks a maid the question, the maid should scare her into galloping hysterics by looking meaningly at her one and only husband and observing, con expressione—“The man I love is married!” The matron would THINK. Indeed, she would be thinking even while she hurriedly pleaded an engagement and piloted her husband out of the maid’s dangerous neighborhood. Possibly that is all that is needed—just to set the married interrogators thinking—to make them realize the enormity of their offense. Surely the utter violation of good taste, the inexcusable intrusion into personal affairs, the suffering they carelessly create must make them pause. If a >vlfe asks the REASON and a maid insinuates that SHE is IT, she level's the popgun of her impertiment Inquiry full in the face of another spinster. And every matron made to think —and feel a little wholesome fear, perhaps—will mean one less maid, at least, to be grilled on the hot plate of the married woman’s curiosity. / If every pretty and attractive unmarried woman would follow out this suggestion a reformation would be effected that would enable us‘ to preserve the sacredness of our memories or our pride or—our reputations! It’s worth trying!—New York Press.