The Washington times., 1920-08-22


the brde-to-be ran the whole affair
II driving away from home in her
own car, picking up her waiting lover from
his hiding place in a city park and whisk-
ing him off to be secretly welded by
suburban parson-has ended in the most
dismal kind of unhappiness. poverty and
actual suffering for the wife and her young
baby.
Miss Alice Drexel, daughter of the very
rich and fashionable John R. Drexels, of
New York. NeSport Philadelphia, London
and Paris, was the dashing heiress VINO
gave surprising proof of woman's new
equality with man by managing her own
elopement with Captain William Barrett,
an American air veteran of the war with
Germany.
And today, before society has hardly
recovered from its astonishment at her
surprising runaway marriage, young Mrs.
Barrett is heart-broken, disillusioned
woman-heartlessly abandoned by her
husband when his love grew cold;. left
practically penniless among strangers in
@ foreign land on the eve Of her baby's
birth; and now, living on the money she
formerly scorned for love, anxiously await.
ing news of her family's forgiveness for
what turns out to have been a most ILL
advised adventure in matrimony
1t is not for forgiveness of all her family
for which she watches the mails and
cables with fearful eyes, for her father
long ago forgave her impetuous, person
ally conducted elopement. But her mother,
the proud Mrs. John r. Drexel, has never
been able to pardon her high-spirited
daughter for upsetting all her fondest
hopes and making marriage which she
has always insisted could end only in
unhappiness.
Now that 1t has ended so much more
disastrously than even Mrs. Drexel feared,
will the mother relent and open her heart
once more to her prodigal daughter? On
this absorbing question opinion is divided
in society at Newport, where Mrs. Drexel
has been entertaining of late with unusual
lavishness, perhaps trying to find solace
in the gay social whirl for her bitter dis
appointment over Alice's unsatisfactory
marriage.
According to close friends, poor Alice
Drexel Barrett is coming home-perhaps;
however. probably not to Newport.
John Drexel, with unusual determination,
has taken the matter in his own hands and
sent one of his secretaries to France to
try to bring back his sorrowing daughter
and her baby.
81 Il is not given to many young girls,
horn and reared in the deepest, softest
Ian of luxury to run the gamut OF human
suffering as Alice Drexel has done in the
short space of what should have been the
most Joyous Season of a woman's life.
Into one short year has been thrust more
tragedy than falls to the lot Of the average
woman in a whole lifetime.
The peculiar environment in which Alice
Drexel had lived all her life forced her,
gossip says, to meet in secret the man
she finally married, to elope with him In
sudden haste and 10 slip away to Europe
with only her jewels and clothes and what
pocket money she had left Of her yearly
allowance. Before the voyage across tho
Atlantic was ended her woman's soul must
have sensed the fact that she had seriously
misjudged the devotion OF the man for
whom she had dared the disapproval of
her parents.
Not long after reaching Europe she was
awake to the appalling realization that