The Birmingham age-herald., 1923-12-24

women WnO write that there Is a dark stain on their past lives. In the head strong folly of youth they took a step down the primrose path, then re- pented of their sin, and turned their backs upon it and laid hold upon righteousness.
 Sometimes nobody knows of the slip but the girl herself and the man who was her partner in wrongdoing. Sometimes woman who had mired her skirts to the knees has washed them clean with her tears of ren-orse, and had the courage to build anew her life in some place where her early escapades are unknown.
 Then love comes to these women. Good men offer them marriage and an honorable place in society. And the question they ask is, shall they lives before they marry them, or bury their secrets in their hearts, and leave the matter on the knees of the gods?
 That is a problem that no human wisdom. can solve, for. so far as the woman is concerned, it is a case in which she will be damned If she does, and damned if she doesn't. Her chances of getting happiness-or misery-through opening up her skel- eton closet and exhibiting its con tents to the man who has asked her to be his wife are about even, With the odds for happiness slightly in favor of keeping the lid clamped good and hard on her secret.
 The question of right does not en- tel into the matter unless you insti- ute prematrimonial confessional in which men shall bare their souls as well as women. There is no more real reason why a. woman should tell man every detail of her past than t- |, -l@ <l every time that he has strayed off of the straight and narrow path.
 It is true that a couple who knew the worst of each other would start out their life together on a firm foun- dation of honest understanding, but nobody can claim that it would make for their felicity, or increase their af- lection for each other.
 On the contrary, they would have swept away every illusion. They would have destroyed the faith of each in the other, and they Would have called into being an evil spirit, a grizzly ghost out of the past. that they could not banish, and that could forever stand between them.
 Men have had the wisdom to per ceive this. They realize that what woman doesn't know doesn't hurt her, but that the thing that she does know she worries herself to death over, and so few men are foolish enough to furnish wife with working diagram of their past lives with which she can torture herself, and them.
 They draw discreet veil over cpl sodes that are best forgotten, any way, and deal only in glittering gen eraiities in referring to their gay bachelor days.
 Moreover, women are sensible enough to let it go at that, No woman wants her husband to tell her things that stab her every time she thinks of them. and that eat like a canker in her memory.
 It is only when the case is re- versed and when it is the woman who has a blot upon her past, that she wonders if 1t is the right thing, the honorable thing, to tell the man who wants to marry her about it.
 Of course, the woman is bound in this by the double code of morals, which make one standard for the woman and another for the man, and that. humorously enough, makes husband feel that he has been ex- ceedingly ill-used if he discovers that his wife has a past that matches his own.
 Therefore. because she is afraid that in future years her husband U else driven by her conscience, or for the sheer relief of sharing her burden with another. the woman nearly always tells everything to the man before marriage.
 Sometimes it drives him. from her Sometimes he loves her enough to marry her, in spite of her revela- tions.
 But while he forgives, he never forgets. Always he is haunted by the memories of what she has re- vealed. He never trusts her, never wholly believes in her. and he has to be a bigger souled man than most men are if he does not reproach her with her past. and use it as whip of scorpions to scourge. her with when he is angry with her.
 Of. course, when either a man or woman's past life has in it some sinister curse that reaches out and lays hand on the future of the one