The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1920-04-27
Dorothy Dir Talks
BIZ DoRoTHY Dfx
worlds highest Paid WanAn writer.
Sympathy.

Sympathy.
Heaven knows why any one should
desire to be an object of pity. because
pity has in 1t an element of contempt.
somehow being weaker, and less for
tunate than ourselves.
Women know this, and yet in spite
of this knowledge their hunger for
sympathy is such an insatiable appe-
tite that they will gulp 1t down no
matter with what arrogance and pa
tronage it is favored, nor hew bitter is
the portion of criticism and advice
that is mingled with 1t.
Strange and inexplicable are the
things that women will do in order to
indulge themselves in the luxury of
wallowing in pity. A woman will tell
you the most intimate secrets of her
life. She will strip every reserve from
her domestic life, and tell you offs her
husbands faults and weaknesses, the
particulars of his business affairs. his
private opinion of his partners, his
anxiety over some deal that he is in
| things that are a black dishonor for
her even to mention.
She will open the door of the fam
| lily closet and rattle the bones of the
skeleton within for even a strange wo-
man who will listen to her with a SYM
pathetic air. She will tell of disgra ce-
fal things that have happened to her
own father or mother, or brothers and
sisters, and which you never could
possibly have known except for her re-
lating them.
| sShe will even go further and traduee
| her own children and tell you of some
youthful folly into which a daughter
was betrayed. or that her sen got into
| trouble about money at the bank and
she had to pay him out and that she's
afraid that John had taken to drink,
and she is SO troubled that she doesn't
know what to do about Mamie, who
will stay out late at night with men OF
whom she disapproves.
! All that you've got TO do to make 8
woman tell you all that she knows and
! everything that has happened to her
or her family, is to let down your hair
with her at night, and click your
tongue against the roof of your mouth
with noise that sounds like syImpa-
I, thy, and say poor thing" to her now
and then. She's SO drunk on sympe-
| thy that she doesn't know what she's
| doing, and she's having the time of her
life without ever stopping to think
| that she is doing herself and her fam
| lily an irreparable harm.
| Instead of realizing that sympathy
| is their besetting sin. women account
| it to themselves for Righteousness
when they use their hearts instead OF
their heads. This makes sympathy for
them a far more dangerous drug than
| morphia, and it should be handled
with more care. We can seldom give
| ~ "it4Aout uOAiiS AiiOie lieis ~ tiatiii SSNu
because when the majority of people
are in trouble what they need is a
brace, not pity They need to be boil
stored UP with the belief that they
have the strength to make a good
fight even when the odds are agains,
them. They need to be buoyed UP
with hope Instead of being pitied as a
down-and- outer who has received a
Knockout blow from fate and who is
a subject for lamentations and tears
| Sympathy is most dangerous when
one acquires the habit of INDUCING in
| it privately. Let any ono daily with
the lf-pity solace and they are done
| for. They sink into a maudlin state
of inaction out of which you can never
rouse them. ss.
Therefore, women may well pray TO
| be saved from being sympathetic, or
sympathized with.
| copyright. 1910, BY the Wheeler syndicate
Incl