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194 that it is an engagement ring does not excuse the assumption of an enormous diamond. A ring which has some sentiment attached to it, or one that has its own story for two, is a thousand times more to be desired than the kind of ring that can be bought by anybody. Certainly you do not want to begin your engagement with, as its souvenir, a ring that has caused your sweetheart to assume a debt, for that would be a very bad commencement.

If your sweetheart is away from you it goes without saying that you will write to each other. Now, I do not want to start a grain of suspicion in your mind, but I must say: do not write to him everything you would say. Men are proverbially careless, and you do not know whose eyes may rest upon your letters, and strangers might find in them a source of amusement that would be extremely mortifying to you. Then, too, while you may give your sweetheart, for his own special pleasure, one picture, do not let him decorate his rooms with innumerable photographs of you for strangers' eyes to rest upon and strangers' lips to criticise. Frenchmen say that if you are looking for the woman a man loves you will not find her picture in his room; that though there may be pictures of many other women there, the woman of his heart cannot be found. It is the woman who is not there whom he loves.