There will always be two schools of preventive hygiene for women. One would protect girls from themselves and their suitors by high walls, ignorance, seclusion, and a   
guardian in attendance at every step. The other would protect them by encouraging high ideals through knowledge, self-respect, liberty, and industry.
 
Neither school ever succeeded altogether, or ever will. The fault of the former is that what is forbidden becomes desirable; high walls are scalable, ignorance 
 
dangerous, seclusion impossible, and guardians either corruptible or careless.
 
The fault of the latter is that emotions alter ideals and subdue them to their own color; that knowledge increases curiosity, self-respect may be overpowered or 
 
undermined, and that liberty enlarges opportunity.
 
It always comes back to the individual occasion and the individual soul in conflict with it. There has been much viciousness in harems and in more sacred inclosures. 
 
And there has been much virtue in dual solitudes, Liberty is not salvation, but at least it encourages intelligence, it enforces responsibility, and it avoids the 
 
infinite evils of tyranny. For that reason, while actresses and other women are not always so good as they might be, they are not often so bad as they might be.
 
Sheila, the actress, was put upon her mettle. She had no duenna to play tricks upon. She had herself to take care of, her preciousness to waste or cherish. Sometimes 
 
women respond to these encounters with singular dignity: sometimes with singular indifference.
 
The town of Clinton was almost all asleep. The very houses seemed tucked up in sheeted moonlight. And soon Sheila and her cavalier—or engineer—were beyond the point 
 
where the streets were subtly changed to roads. The last car on the suburban line growled and glittered past, lurching noisily on its squealing rails. And then they 
 
were alone under the moony vastitude of sky, with the dream-drenched earth revolving around them in a huge, slow wheel.
 
The car purred with the contentment of a great house-cat and lapped up the glimmering road like a stream of milk.
 
Sheila felt the spirit of the night, and felt that all the universe was in tender rapport with itself. She felt as never before the grace of love, the desire, the need 
 
of love. For years she had been exerting herself for her ambition, and now her ambition was tired. The hour of womanhood was striking, almost silently, yet as 
 
unmistakably as the distant town clock that published midnight, so far away as to be less overheard than felt in the slow throb of the air.
 
Bret Winfield’s response to the mood of the night was pagan. Sheila was a mighty nice girl and darned pretty and she had consented to take a midnight spin with him. 
 
But many darned pretty girls had done the same. A six-cylinder motor-car is a very winsome form of invitation.
 
In place of inviting a young man to a cozy corner in a parlor or a hammock on a piazza, the enterprising maiden of the day accepts his invitation—and seats herself in 
 
a flying hammock. Seclusion is secured and concealment attained by way of velocity.
 
A wonderful change had taken place in the world of lovers in the last ten years. For thousands of years before—ever since, indeed, the first man invented the taming 
 
of the first horse and took his cave-girl buggy-riding on a pair of poles or in a square-wheeled cart—lovers had been kept to about the same pace. Suddenly they were 
 
given a buggy that can go sixty miles an hour or better; so fast, indeed, that it is veiled in its own speed and its own dust. Even the naughty gods and the goddesses 
 
of Homer never knew any concealment like it.
 
Winfield was an average young man who had known average young women averagely well. He had found that demoiselles either would not motor with him at all or, motoring 
 
with him, expected to be paid certain gallant attentions. He always tried to live up to their expectations. They might struggle, but never fiercely enough to endanger 
 
the steering-wheel. They might protest, but never loudly enough to drown the engine.
 
Such was his experience with the laity. Sheila was his first actress, not including a few encounters with those camp-followers of the theater who are only accepted as 
 
“actresses” when they are arrested, and who have as much right to the name as washwomen for a convent have the right to be called “nuns,” when they drink too much.
 
But Winfield had reasoned that if the generality of pretty girls who motored with men were prepared for dalliance, by so much more would an actress be. Consequently, 
 
when he reached a hilltop where there was a good excuse for pausing to admire the view of a moon-plated river laid along a dark valley, he shut off the power and slid 
 
his left arm back of Sheila.
 
She sat forward promptly and his heart began to chug.
 
Making love is an old and foolish game, but strangely exciting at the time. Winfield was more afraid to withdraw his arm than to complete the embrace.
 
Sheila’s heart was spinning, too. She had thrilled to the love-croon of the night. The landscape before her and beneath her seemed to be filled with dreams. But she 
 
was in love with love and not with Bret Winfield.
 
When she recognized that he was about to begin to initiate her by a familiar form of amorous hazing into the ancient society whose emblem is a spoon, she abruptly 
 
decided that she did not want to belong. Winfield became abruptly more of a stranger than ever.
 
Sheila did not want to hate this nice young man. She did not want to quarrel with her chauffeur so far from home at so compromising an hour. She did not want to wreck 
 
the heavenly night with idiotic combat. She hated the insincerity and perfunctoriness that must be the effect of any protest. She was actress enough to realize that 
 
the lines the situation required of her had long ago lost their effectiveness and their very sincerity.
 
But she did not want to be hugged. She loathed the thought of being touched by this man’s arm. She felt herself as precious and her body as holy as the lofty emotion 
 
of the night. Still, how could she protest till he gave her cause? He gave her cause.
 
Her very shoulder-blades winced as she felt Winfield’s arm close about her; she shivered as his big hand folded over her shoulder.
 
Sheila groped for appropriate words. Winfield’s big handsome face with the two dim lenses over his eyes was brought nearer and nearer to her cheek. Then, without 
 
giving him even the help of resistance, she inquired, quite casually:
 
“Is it true that they can send you to the penitentiary if you hit a man in the face when he’s wearing glasses?”
 
Sheila was as astounded as Winfield was at this most unexpected query. His lips paused at her very cheek to stammer:
 
“I don’t know. But why? What about it?”
 
“Because if it is true I want you either to take your arm away or take your glasses off.”
 
“I don’t understand.”
 
“You don’t have to. All you have to understand is that I don’t want your arm around me. I’d rather go to the penitentiary than have you kiss me.”
 
“For the Lord’s sake!” Winfield gasped, relaxing his clutch.
 
Sheila went on with that sarcasm which is cold poison to romance: “I don’t blame you for attempting it. I know it’s the usual thing on such occasions. But I don’t 
 
like it, and that ought to be enough.”
 
Winfield sighed with shame and regret. “It’s quite enough! I beg your pardon very humbly. Shall we turn back now?”
 
“If you please.”
 
The very engine seemed to groan as Winfield started it up again. It clucked reprovingly, “Ts! ts! ts!”
 
Winfield was more angry than sorry. He had made a fool of himself and she had made another fool of him. He was young enough to grumble a little, “Are you in love with 
 
that man Eldon?”
 
“He’s very nice.”
 
“You love him, then?”
 
“Not at all.”
 
“Well, then, if you keep me at such a distance, why do you—how can you let him put his arms round you and kiss you twice a day before everybody?”
 
“He gets paid for it, and so do I.”
 
“That makes it worse.”
 
“You think so? Well, I don’t. Actors are like doctors. They have special privileges to do things that would be very wrong for other people.”
 
Winfield laughed this to scorn. Sheila was furious.
 
“If there weren’t any actors there wouldn’t be any Shakespeare or any of the great plays. Doctors save people from death and disease. Actors save millions from 
 
melancholy and from loneliness, and teac............