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/ \ J ► A Girl s Fear of “Old-Maidism” Th j e Last Da y Copyright, IBIS, International New* Berrien By NELL BRINKLEY & j The Manicure T J - JZjeOL Lady By BEATRICE FAIRFAX. Dear Miss Fairfax: I am 25 years old, a trained nurse. I have been nursing a woman for six months, and her son has fallen in love with me. He wants to marry me; he is very rich and would give me every thing. I am not in love with him, but feel kindly toward him. Ought I to let this chance go? I may never have another one like it, and what if I never fall really in love? Won’t I be sorry that I did not grasp this chance before it was too late? I don’t want to be an old maid. PERPLEXED. O H, for goodness sake, “Per plexed,” where do you live and what sort of people do you know—to talk about hating to be an old maid? Why, there aren’t any sucn things any more, didn’t you know that? Old maids went out of existence when the bachelor girls came in—look around you a little, use your eyes and ears. Think for yourself; don t keep repeating over some silly phrase you’ve let someone else get into your head. You’ve seen a bit of the world, or ought to have seen some of it, in your business. Who’s the woman you are sorriest for on earth—a woman you know, I mean, not one you’ve read about or seen in some play? Is it an “old maid” making her own living, living her own peaceful, happy life, or her married sister, with an indif ferent husband, three children and not a day in the year or an hour to call her own? Come right down to common sense now—who looks the youngest, the married women you know or the “old maids,” as you call them? Which has the most money to spend, which travels the most, which has the best time altogether? Lo )k for yourself now and see what you shall see. Little Mrs. Somebody there, in the flat above yours—her husband drinks a little. Mrs. Nobody there in the flat across the hall, her husband is pleasant to you when you meet him on the stairs; you can hear him growling at his wife the minute he gets inside the door. Little * Mrs. What of It down the hall, her hus band is too good lo king, he spends all his money on clothes and lets his wife look like a rag bag; you look younger and happier this very minute than any of these ordinary everyday women. Why don’t you have sense enough to realize it and be grateful? Marriage is the finest, happiest, best thing in the world, when it is the right marriage. When it is the wrong one or the merely halfway right one, the old maid has the best of the bargain every day In the year. Love is the one thing that makes marriage possible, not respect, not admiration not tolerance not grat itude—just old-fashioned foolish, blind, unreasonable love. If you haven’t got that stay an old maid as long as you live and be glad you had sense enough to do it. Why haven’t you waked up to the fact that the majority of the old maids spend half of their time pitying the married women and the other half lending them money to make up back payments on the grocery bills so they can get new hats and things? Who goes to the seaside in August; who has little runs down to Coney or over to Manhattan Beach? Who has the latest hat and the newest things in gloves? Who wears the neatest boots and goes to the be9t restau rants? Sister Sa\lie, the old maid with her own bank account and her own friends and her own good times. Who stays at home with the sick baby? Who cooks the dinner over a hot ga9 plate? Who turns last year’s frock and mends up her old gloves because ‘‘John is feeling poor this month?” Sister Mary, the mar ried woman. If Sister Mary loves her husband and Sister Mary’s husband loves her. she’s better off than all the old maids on earth: but if Sister Mary just married Brother John to “get a home” and stop being an old maid, she’s so much worse off than Sister Sallie that it almost makes me cry to think about her at all. Bid the young man good-by. “Per plexed.” pack your little valise, tie on your little bonnet and go on, down the road alone, till you meet the right man; then you won’t need anybody's advice about what to do and when to do it. “All the long vacation days together are not so sweet as this—the LAST winged day.” Nell Brinkley Says A UTUMN, red leaves in her sultry hair, is leaning to the Earth. Already the “quaking asp” in the far West is turning to thin, fine gold—the oak in the soberer East is changing from green to dusky red—under the magic of her hand. Women-folk are dreaming of their Winter frocks— “haus-fraus” of their coal and hickory logs the first smoke of Fall-leaf burnings will curl soon and spread in fragrant haze through the woods and suburban streets. Little kids ■will soon be kicking a big, brown ball instead of pitching a little white one—lovers of the sea are lingering long and swimming hard in his keen arms, knowing that soon they will be ice—and the city, the great core, is reaching a thou sand hands and grabbing back her workers who have spread wide and far. For vacation days are going! Already at country station, sad brown boys are climbing aboard trains, with sad, brown girls (girls are the lucky things—however it is they usually can stay longer than the fellows) on the platform. The sad, brown boy lias his city clothes on—with a tight wiiite collar that looks pallid against the bronze of his neck his duck hat is in his trunk, and his stiff town hat torments his sunburnt forehead. The sad, brown girl is still in her heelless sneakers— and middy and naked head. Pretty soon she. too, will be in patent-kids with silver buckles—tailored and covered of head with her browned cheeks turned to the city. Every Summer hotel—the shores of the grav sea here, and the shores of the raw-blue sea in the West; piney woods in the Rockies; lakes in New England; country towns in North and South and East and West—are GOOD-BY places now. On the sand-dune they have their last day. There are a million things to say—and they say nothing! The sea is very still, and a land wind blows her hair in little, ripply banners, whips his tie and lifts the tawnv coat of her collie. The gulls scream and sail against the teen blue of the sky. And all tiie time the sea lisps in a little line of lather on the sunny sand. The dog’s brown eyes are miserable. The man’s gray ones are blank with despair. The girl’s are misty and absent. The hours go like swift-sliding water. And, oddly enough —this their last day to laugh and love and fill witli all the de- iighfs they find in one another—is singularly empty. They touch hands little, their tongues are tied, his gayety and clever tongue that she adores go suddenly back on him. He is very dull! Her tende,rness her alert little brain—are quite gone away. She is very stupid! And pretty soon the wine-like light of the sunset dyes all the world in claret-rihe girl shivers a little and the man clears his throat and says in a stranger’s voice, “Had we bet ter go?” And the last day is over. By WILLIAM F. KIRK. ((IT T1LFRED Is in pretty soft up yy home now, George,” said * * the Manicure Lady. “Ha has wrote a new song success, and that makes two daisies he has put over the plate. You retriember I was telling you about the other ballad, 'Gone Beyond Recall?’ Well, he has wrote a new ballad that he thinks is going to make him a small fortune, and I wouldn't be surprised if it did. The name'of it Is ’Her Name Is Sel dom Mentioned, If at All,’ and the gink that Is publishing it told my brother yesterday that It ought to go grand. The old gent Is getting so ha even pats Wilfred on the back, which is a sure treat for my poor brother, who was never used to no gentler voice from father than the voice of a skipper on the Great Lakes.” "What makes you so sure he Is going to make money on a song with a name like that?" asked the Head Barber. "Oh. I just can’t explain It.” re plied the Manicure Lady, "but I have a kind of a preposition that It will, one of them hunches that comes to us sometimes. 1 think that’s what you call It—’preposition’ or ’admoni tion,’ or something like that. Any- • how, I told Wilfred not to sell the song for no small figure. "The music sounds kind of like tha wailing of the winds In some of them ’ tall trees that grows near a lake, and ’ it fits the words grand. If you want ‘ to listen, George, I will sing the first verse and chorus, kind of low, before some fresh customer horns in and spoils it. How do you like this: « “A handsome young attorney was a- settlng on a chair Within his sweetheart’s home one winter night. His love for that young lady he wanted to declare, While all them lights was shining gay and bright. “I’ll tell to you a secret first,” the maiden fair did say: “This picture of my sister we keep hid; And ere Ill be your bride, I think I shall decide To tell you what my sister dear has did: * Chorus* "Her name Is seldom mentioned, if at all; She ran away from home one win ter day. She had Intended leaving In the fall. But waited till her love could draw his pay. They’re married, but they didn’t ask the folks. And so on us they never, never call. She should not have went away, ujxrn that winter day: Her name is seldom mentioned, It at all.” “Tt sounds like a lot of other mush songs about broken hearts.” said the Head Barber. "But I wouldn’t be sur prised If it sold big. It ain’t the good stuff that goes nowadays.” "I like your nerve,” said the Mani cure Lady. “If Wilfred heard that you said them words, he would come down here and mop the floor with your map. That’s the last poetry l am ever going to recite to a mutt like you.” "Good,” declared the Head Barber. “I’ll remember that promise on Thanksgiving Day.” « BEHIND CLOSED DOORS C VP By ANNA KATHARINE J^REEN One of the Greatest Mystery Stories Ever Written: T HERE are many hot spots in love letters when love is new, but after a time—just before the marriage—there are only two: A.t the beginning, and just before the signa ture., No girl should allow a young man to call on her oftener than three times a week, even though she is en gaged to him. Men get tired of the same kind of pie if they have it too often, and a man’s heart is cut out on the same plan as his stomach, only smaller. If lovers do anything that is amus ing, don’t restrain a desire to laugh through fear of hurting their feel- ngs. Though you laugh so loud you awaken the baby in the next block, the lovers sitting on the same bench with you will not hear you. It often happens that after mar riage the word “love” has the same effect as 4 whiff of cooking after one has had too much breakfast. There was a time when a girl who was disappointed in love pined away for at least six months, and felt momentary twinges for six months longer, but of late years an empty i«wrt is as easily relieved of its dis tress as an empty stomach. All married women look as if they had resolved: That love is one thing and matrimony another. Before a girl marries she worries that folks may be saying she is so unattractive she can’t get a husband, and after she is married she worries that they may be thinking she jumped at the first chance. The girl in love with the office boy has a greater opinion of his business ability than the wife of the manager has of her husband’s. The girl is NOT married to the office boy! (Copyright, 1913, by Anna Katharine Green.) TO-DAY’S INSTALLMENT. “With all my efforts I have but suc ceeded in gaining but the barest out line of these days, which must have been so full of emotion for this broken- down but still loving and unsatisfied woman. That she did see her more than once at this time is evident from words she let fall in the letters she wrote to this friend of whom I have before spoken. But that she broke her oath by speaking to the child we have no proof, nor is It to be presumed she did, though the temptation must have been great at times, especially when ah* came upon her alone, as she must have done more than once. We have even j the record of a day when, after a walk of miles, she came to the house where Mrs. Gretorex was living, only to ob serve her daughter driving away from the door in a carriage. Though she had no right to be disappointed, and though she had often taken the same journey without any other reward than a sight of the windows behind which her child was supposed to be setting, she felt herself strangely unnerved by this in cident, and only realized what a spec tacle she was making of nerself. when she beheld the passersby turn and look at her as she stood the”e wringing her hands and moaning feebly to herself. Then she was frightened and, turning fled away, only to come hack again in the evening, or when her expectations being less, her disappointment could he more easily hidden. Meanwhile, with out special pride or satisfaction, she saw Mildred advance in mind and improve in a thousand ways. “She loved her and leaned on her, and in time profiled by her earnings to the extent of owing her very sustenance to her; but her deepest thoughts, her deepest longings, were for the proud and dainty Genevieve, who, like as not, passed her with a stare of haughty in quiry, or that worse aspect of utter in difference, which would be most natu ral under th4* circumstances. To see her at her side, to hear her speak the word mother, was worth the sacrifice of her existence; and when both girls reached the estate of womanhood, and she beheld one tolling with uncomplain ing affection to supply her failing health with the comforts she needed, it was not on her account she summoned up strength for those long walks through the city streets, but to catch a glimpse of that other one, riding by in her carriage in an atmosphere of wealth and fashion that must have almost overwhelmed the poor woman. The ex treme likeness between the sisters add ed to this effect and was the reason perhaps why she never took Mildred with her on these expeditions, even after she grew so feeble that she often tottered in the streets and had to sit down on stoops to rest herself. And did Mildred know the secret of her mother’s con duct and frequent despairs? Though no account is given of when or where the revelation was made, there are words scattered through these same letters which show that the less favored child had moments of rebellion against the splendor and love which surrounded her more fortunate sister, though she never allowed her feelings to interfere with her labors or the ever increasing care with which she surrounded her mother. “And so the days went by, and the moment came which changed all their lives and led in some strange and as yet uncomprehended way to the tragedy in which we are specially interested. I allude to the instant when Mrs. Far ley broke her oath and the silence of years and informed Miss Gretorex of the falsity of her relationship to the woman she called mother, and her true relationship to herself and the girl who had solicited her custom and demanded her patronage. It took place through Mildred, and I am disposed to think in Miss Gretorex * room. But my details on this subject are very meager, ow ing to the fact that Mrs. Farley wrote but one letter after this period and that a very disjointed and unsatisfactory one. Her ei>d was near, and beyond wild expressions of thankfulness that she had been at last allowed to clasp her darling Genevieve in her arms, there is little to enlighten the recipient or us. But we can surmise that in connection with what Mrs. Cameron has told us of her first meeting with the youthful dressmaker, came that dressmaker’s startling revelation of their relation- i ship, followed by an appeal which final ly brought the wealthy young lady to the poor widow’s bedside. "For more than one person at Mrs. Olney’s boarding house remembers the day when a private carriage drove up to the house ami an elegant lady, closely veiled, descended and made her way without inquiry to Mrs. Farley’s room, with the ostensible purpose of having a dress fitted. But her stay lengthened Into hours, and much won derment was created. Nor was this the only time she came. More than once during Mrs. Farley’s illness her carriage was seen in front of the house, and once after Mrs. Farley died. But she never again remained beyond proper limits, and the gossip which her first visit had Created soon died out for the want of fuel to feed it.” There was silence. Mr. Gryce had evidently finished his story. With an ef fort the doctor roused himself, eyed the narrator and asked in a strange tone that of itself awakened anew the de tective’s interest: . "Do you know if she ever met Dr. Molesworth in any of these visits she paid her mother?” It was a new note sounded. Mr. Gryce recognized the fact, and for a moment locked not only thoughtful, hut inquisitive. Then he shook his head and somewhat equivocally replied: “We have not got to the end of our inquiries yet.” "Then,” was the doctor’s grim con clusion, “this discovery that my wife was sister to the girl who died in her room has not satisfied you that she was innocent of her death?” “It has made the theory of suicide seem less improbable. While It Is hard to imagine that a seamstress would be initiated into the secrets of Miss Gre- torex’s jewel case, a sister might. Yet ” “You are not perfectly satisfied,” fin ished the doctor, "difficult as it Is to discover a motive for murder, and sim ple as it is to see that of suicide." “I am ready to be made so,” the de tective suggested. "I ask nothing bet ter than to have my mind cleared of every doubt concerning one whose sit uation is so pitiful, and who holds so close a relationship to yourself. As proof of it, 1 am willing to talk over probabilities with you for another half hour. For instance, do you think her dread of having you learn her true parentage was enough to account for the extreme suffering which blanched her hair in a night and laid her in a state of insensibility at our feet?” The doctor was silent. Mr. Gryce’s look and tone became al most fatherly. "I have seen much of life,” he pur sued, “and much of women. Forced by my business into scenes trying to every faculty of their mind and emo- tional nature, it has been my lot to be hold them in their love, their hate, their triumph and their despair; and I have found that, though they can feign much, conceal much, hear much, they succumb only when they own a fright ful secret and can see no way of hiding it any longer. Such a secret I believe your wife to hold, and till you name it by some other name than that of mur der, I must continue to think she was the occasion, intentionally or uninten tionally, of Mildred Farley’s death.” If this language and the whole gen eral conduct shown by the detective at this crisis was a scheme on his part to get at a truth he otherwise feared to miss, he was certainly successful; for no sooner had these words passed his lips than the doctor’s face lost the pe culiar look 11 had hitherto worn, and with a start he vehemently cried: "Well, I will give it a name. At the sacrifice of every particle of pride left me after the scourging process to which I have been subjected, I will tell you what that secret is. To save her I could scarcely do more, and yet to her I would willingly give my life." "Let me hear it,” answered the de tective. "If it is a secret that can he kept without violation of our duty, he assured that no one beside the inspector and myself shall ever know it.” Dr. Cameron looked at the detective, and said slowly: “Do you know why the woman we saw thorugh the curtain at the C- Hotel, looked so astoundlngly like my wife that we found it imDossible to suppose her to he any one else?” Mr. Gryce smiled. “Why, I have just told you,” said he. “She was Mildred Farley, your wife’s twin sister, and as like her ” “You mistake," was the dry interrup tion. "She whom we saw that day was not Mildred Farley but Genevieve Gre torex: in other words my wife herself, or she who afterwards became so.” Heart of Genevieve Gretorex. HIS revelation so faf 1 ^eyond Mr. Suspense. One of the ushers approached 4 man who appeared to be annoying those about him. "Don’t you like the show?” “Yes, indeed!” “Then why do you persist in hiss ing the performers?” "Why, m-man alive, I w-wasn’t h-hlssing! I w-was s-s-slmply s-s-s-saylng to S-s-s-sammie that the s-s-s-singlng la s-s-s-superb.” T Gryce’s expectations woke with in him a peculiar excitement: the pupil of his eye diminished rather than enlarged, and the hand which toyed with the penwiper, whose leaves held so many of his secrets, trembled, or seemed to do so. "Is that so?" he muttered. "Genevieve Cameron,” continued the doctor, in a dry, hard tone, as if he felt that only by the suppression of all emo tion would he be enabled to get through the relation he had before him, "suffers the consequences of Genevieve Gretorex’s folly hut she is no longer swayed by it. She loves her husband an<j only dreads his discovery of the waywardness of her early affections. For the motive which drew her away from home and kept her lingering in that hotel up to almost the hour of her promised marriage with me was a strong, senseless and mistaken fancy for Julius Molesworth.” It was out, and Mr. Gryce as well as Dr. Cameron himself, looked relieved. It only remained now to explain mat ters. “Your story,” the doctor went on, "was a fitting prelude to mine, for my it we understand how this elegant and reserved woman came to meet this man. It was in Mrs. Olney’s house and at the bedside of Mrs, Farley, whom T now recognize for her real mother Though engaged to me, she was moved by something in his manner and speech, and this susceptibility, incomprehensi ble to me I assure you, strengthened Into passion as she saw him again and again at the same place, till she was ready to forget honor, duty, and her plighted word: the very remoteness of the world in which h* lived, so differ ent from that with which she daily came In contact, lending a glamour of romance to the situation which was cer tainly not In it to any other eyes and not in it to her when she came to the final hour and realized all she must give up and all she must take on, the be the fitting wife for the hard-natured, poverty-stricken man she had chosen." To Be Continued To-morrow. Called to Memory. "Herbie, it says here another octo genarian is dead.” "What is an octogenarian?" "Well, I don’t quite know what they are, but they must be sickly creatures. You never hear of them but they’re dying.” BUY THE BEST TEA .2P A The satisfaction that comes from purchasing: the best may be real ized by selecting Maxwell House Blend Tea Costs No More Accept No Substitute X-IK. B-Ib. and 1-lk A^Tight Canister*. Atk your grocer for it Cheek-Neal Coffee Co., Neskville Beast** JackaeavUle Funeral Designs and Flowers FOR ALL OCCASIONS. Atlanta Floral Company 455 EAST FAIR STREET. While on the Pacific Coast read the San Francisco Examiner Agnes ScottCollege DECATUR GEORGIA Session Opens Sept. 17th For Catalogue and Bulletin of Views Address the President, F. H. GAINES, D. D., LL. D.