WHAT THEY DO'WITH THEIR LOVE LETTERS

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 42, 13 November 1926, Page 18

WHAT THEY DO'WITH THEIR LOVE LETTERS

Women are so terribly eloquent—they' write pages of the most delicious nonsense to the beloved, pages which are less a passionate outpouring to one Edward Jones, a very ordinary man, than an unconscious ode penned to the Love-god himself. For women love love, while men love women . . . and never was a woman vet born who hadn’t a fatal capacity for expressing herself! But the men who receive these letters, in however few, bald, and uninspired words they mar reply to them—cannot resist keeping them. •' Now, why do people keep love-let-ters? It is quite mad, we all know. At the most sordid, it may land one in Court. At the most idealistic, why keep the letters if you have had the luck to keep the writer? Yet find me the woman—or the man—who can bear to throw away these close-writ-ten scraps of paper, unique relics of a moment when one was, at least to one other person, a goddess—or a god! Yes, the most pompous and the least interesting business _ man you know has —you can be quite sure of it—kept Ins love-letters, amazing though the thought may be that anyone with a head so bald and a waist 'so pronounced can ever have had any. Perhaps he has filed them, the ruling passion being strong even in love, and you would, find, if you knew where to look, neat red-taped packets, headed “Lucy’s letters, the summer preceding our marriage, 1898-99.” And here is an odd thing about loveletters. You don’t only keep those written by your lover; you sometimes keep those from one or two who, unloved, love von. The ugliest and most foolish admirer vou ever had might find his letter had attained immortality if he had had the luck to hit on some phrase that pleased you. You may nevgr read his letter twice—but _in your mind a tiny, satisfied voic6 says: “Some man’ once thought you were as wonderful as that!” _ And you will save pages of nteanderings from a man you would- certainly cross the road to avoid for the sake of that one sentence in the middle. We all do it. The' hardest-headed lawyer who ever bullied a female prisoner into hysterics—he who knows the damning evidence of that which is set down in black and white as no other man knows it—will still be unable to part from the written evidence that one woman knew and loved him for a reckless fool where others took him for nothing, but a cautious knave! Some lock their love-letters up in safes, others file them under the letter “L,” others sleep’ with them under their pillows, others wear them (shamefacediv and regretting the ■skimpiness of modern dresses) next their hearts, others push them into secret drawers . . . but those who strike a prudent match and burn them are rare indeed. May the Fates punish them bv never sending them another !—Dorothv Buck, in the “Daily Mail.”-