Dorothy Dix—her book
Date: 2025-02-23T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Conduct of life; Marriage

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Title: Dorothy Dix—her book

Every-day help for every-day people

Author: Dorothy Dix

Release date: February 23, 2025 [eBook #75448]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1926

Credits: Bob Taylor, Tim Miller and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Books project.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOROTHY DIX—HER BOOK ***

Yours Sincerely
Dorothy Dix

Dorothy Dix—Her Book

Every-day Help
For Every-day People

SECOND EDITION

FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
NEW YORK and LONDON
1927

Copyright, 1926, by
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
[Printed in the United States of America]
Published, August, 1926

Copyright Under the Articles of the Copyright Convention
of the Pan-American Republics and the
United States, August 11, 1910.

Contents

CHAPTER | | PAGE
| Foreword | xi
| Introduction | xix
I | How a Husband Likes to be Treated | 1
II | Charm | 10
III | The Ordinary Woman | 22
IV | Teach the Children to Love Father | 27
V | Strike a Balance with Matrimony | 32
VI | Jealousy | 39
VII | Have a Goal | 44
VIII | The Goat Family | 48
IX | Spoiling a Wife | 53
X | The Absence Cure for Family Ills | 58
XI | The Deadly Rival | 63
XII | Learn a Trade, Girls | 67
XIII | Trial Divorce | 76
XIV | Marry the Man You Love | 81
XV | Are You Good Company for Yourself? | 87
XVI | Keeping Young | 92
XVII | Gossip, the Policeman | 96
XVIII | The Lucky Working Woman | 100
XIX | An Indoor Sport | 105
XX | Should Women Tell? | 109
XXI | Domestic Boredom | 114
XXII | To Marry or Not to Marry | 118
XXIII | Woman’s Greatest Gift | 122
XXIV | Grafting on the Old Folks | 127
XXV | Are You a Good Father? | 132
XXVI | The Moral Muscles of Your Children | 136
XXVII | The Mother-in-Law | 140
XXVIII | Why Our Families Rile Us | 145
XXIX | Our Lives Are What We Make Them | 149
XXX | Husband Losers | 154
XXXI | Martha or Mary? | 159
XXXII | The T. B. M. at Home | 163
XXXIII | Don’t Be Afraid to Let Your Husband See You Love Him | 169
XXXIV | Queer Things about Marriage | 174
XXXV | Husbands—The Living Conundrum | 180
XXXVI | The Power of Suggestion | 185
XXXVII | Woman’s Missionary Opportunity | 190
XXXVIII | How to be a Good Husband | 195
XXXIX | Giving Children Advantages | 200
XL | Sell Yourself to Your Children | 205
XLI | Taking Husbands “As Is” | 210
XLII | Being a Good Wife | 215
XLIII | Invalidism a Graft | 222
XLIV | Selfishness Made to Order | 227
XLV | Self-Control | 231
XLVI | Old Fathers and New Daughters | 236
XLVII | Losing a Wife’s Love | 240
XLVIII | The Lure of the Married Man | 245
XLIX | Forget It | 249
L | Lost Love | 254
LI | The Show Wedding | 259
LII | When Your Children Are Glad You Die | 264
LIII | What Price Pleasure? | 269
LIV | The Ideal Mother | 273
LV | How to Catch a Wife | 278
LVI | Dangerous Girls | 283
LVII | When a Girl Loves a Man | 288
LVIII | Marriage Lessons | 293
LIX | The Superior Business Woman | 297
LX | New Ideals for Old | 301
LXI | Why Divorce is Common | 305
LXII | The Children Pay | 310
LXIII | The Learned Profession of Home-Making | 315
LXIV | A Father’s Influence | 320
LXV | The Riches of Poor Children | 325
LXVI | A Man’s Right to His Home | 330
LXVII | Devouring Friends | 334
LXVIII | The Secret of Happiness | 338
LXIX | Preparedness for Old Age | 343

Foreword

Dorothy Dix—Her Book

A Foreword by Richard Duffy

To the accurately estimated millions of readers who are familiar with Dorothy Dix’s understanding and interpretation of the plain facts of everyday life and also its enigmas, it may appear a presumption that one should attempt a foreword of explanation to make clear why a choice of her daily contributions to the press, not only in the United States and Canada, but also in farther regions of the world, should be deemed worthy of the more permanent shelter of book covers. But it becomes at once justifiable when we try to present a true account of the work of “The Little Lady of New Orleans,” as one of her oldest editors calls her. She herself confesses that, among the hundreds of letters she receives each day from men and women, young, adult and aged, there recur the questions: “Are you a real person, or only a newspaper syndicate name?” “Are you a man, or are you a woman?” “Are you married or single?” “Have you ever been married?” “If you have not been married, would you marry?” “If you have been married—and are not now—would you marry again?” “Have you any children? If so—are they boys or girls—and how many?” It must be emphasized that the questions above recorded are not asked by correspondents merely curious, who put the questions just to probe the author of the Dorothy Dix articles. Not at all, these questions are asked in letters revealing the puzzles of life that entangle the very writers who address Dorothy Dix. Before they make the simplest inquiry as to the trustworthiness of Dorothy Dix, they tell their own troubles in the way we all have of saying: “Of course what I have said to you is wholly confidential. Now let me know where you stand—I mean about absolute personal fidelity.” To a hard-boiled business man, or business woman, such a remark seems trite. Yet, we must remember that hard-boiled business persons run to the courts every so often to discover between themselves, at great expense, how personal fidelity, in gush and in fact, sharply contrast.

The self-styled hard-boiled people and the people who pretend they are less sophisticated than they are, look to Dorothy Dix for a way out of all their troubles. These two classes are to be reckoned with, because they are always telling their troubles to some confidant—the less known, the better. But the vast majority of the people who write to Dorothy Dix for counsel and guidance are profoundly sincere and earnest, not so much because they fear to be otherwise, but because they are so firmly persuaded of the sincerity and earnestness of life itself, when they look it square in the face and without pose of any kind. All and any of these correspondents of Dorothy Dix are struggling with their problems of how to make life livable. In the case of the young woman who has a good job and, at the same time, has a good home with her parents, the question arises whether she should marry the man she likes, and who on his part likes her, and then undertake to become a parent herself without a salaried job and without the safeguard of the home provided by her father and mother. On the other side there appears the problem of the young man, who would marry, but for responsibilities, psychological as well as financial, that make him stop, look and listen before he leaves a dependent father and mother unsupported.

We pass to the men and women who are actually married and suddenly discover that they are facing the real and inevitable conflict of life at home as compared with the daily battle of the business world. Some husbands are go-getters, but they do not get anywhere because their wives are shiftless as home managers, or because they are spendthrifts, and would always, without trying, spend twice as much money as any husband has, or can earn. Some wives are the best of helpmates, but are linked to husbands who simply cannot or will not achieve the quiet fame of a weekly pay-envelope which is the rock foundation of “Home Sweet Home.”

Some wives are afflicted with the disease of “social climbing.” They spend their days and nights proving to their husbands that for every dollar earned, it is better to spend two dollars, in order to take a chance at three, by inviting the Smiths to the theatre and to supper afterward. Such wives usually overlook the fact that the Smiths, with whom they would curry favor at great expense, are themselves spending two dollars for every one dollar gained on the principle that it is a good investment to obtain equal social standing with the Joneses.

Also to be encountered in this book are the varied specimens of husbands and wives who have become tired of each other and seek from Dorothy Dix guidance towards a way out of what they consider the morass of marriage. Then, too, we meet the father, or the mother, who is perplexed about the way children grow up nowadays—as tho the way children grew up has not always been a surprise to parents since the days of Romulus and Remus. To sum up, all dramatis personæ in the stupendous play of life, being enacted day in and day out, as we live, are brought on the world’s stage before us, not so much by Dorothy Dix as by themselves in the confidences they repose in her and the disclosures they make about themselves.

Despite this fact there never has been nor will there be anything merely approaching a betrayal of confidence by Dorothy Dix. She talks to the whole world of men and women, and their worries and concerns are so alike that all shadow of individual identity is lost. She talks to them, not from the pedestal of the highbrow, but from the average level of a human being, who herself has fought the grim battle of life—as may be learned from her personal statement, which immediately follows these pages. One of the most distinguished of living American novelists, on being shown a few letters in her day’s mail, asked:

“How many such letters do you receive a month?”

She replied: “It takes me from three to four hours each day to answer my correspondents—and then I have to write my articles besides.”

“Great Scott!” exclaimed the novelist. “You have more plots in a day’s letters than any hard-working novelist could invent in a year.”

But none of these potential plots is available even for the most prolific of story-writers, because they are not “plots” to Dorothy Dix, but sacred testimonies to the help the “Little Lady of New Orleans” has been able to render through many years to her ever-increasing number of friends and confidants.

Introduction

Introduction

MY PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

I have had what people call a hard life. I have been through the depths of poverty and sickness. I have known want and struggle and anxiety and despair. I have always had to work beyond the limit of my strength.

As I look back upon my life, I see it as a battlefield strewn with the wrecks of dead dreams and broken hopes and shattered illusions—a battle in which I always fought with the odds tremendously against me, and which has left me scarred and bruised and maimed and old before my time.

Yet I have no pity for myself; no tears to shed over the past and gone sorrows; no envy for the women who have been spared all that I have gone through.

For I have lived. They have only existed. I have drunk the cup of life down to the very dregs. They have only sipped at the bubbles on the top of it.

I know things they will never know. I see things to which they are blind. It is only the women whose eyes have been washed clear with tears who get the broad vision that makes them little sisters to all the world.

This of itself is a compensation for many sorrows, but I have more. I have proved myself to myself. I know that I have the strength to endure and the courage to carry on, and that I will not be craven enough to run up the white flag, no matter what other difficulties I may be called upon to meet.

The skeleton at the feast of the woman who has always been happy and prosperous is fear. She becomes panic-stricken when she thinks that she may be called upon to meet trouble; that she may have hardships to endure; that her soul may be torn with suffering. She suffers with apprehension at the thought of poverty, and wonders how she could endure to go shabby and do without the things to which she is accustomed. She wonders helplessly what she would do if she had to earn her own living.

I am not afraid of poverty because I have been poor and I know that poverty has its consolations and brings you pleasures that money cannot buy. Nor am I afraid to support myself. I have earned my bread and butter for many years. I know the joy of work and I know that to a woman, just the satisfaction of knowing that she is self-supporting turns her crust into angel’s food.

None of the fears with which happy women torture themselves upon occasion have any terrors for me. I know them for the bogies they are, and know, too, that they fly away before the person who does not cringe before them.

Often I am tempted to envy the woman who has always had some strong man to stand between her and the world, some man whose tenderness and love has guarded and protected her. But I am consoled for not being a clinging vine when I wonder what the vine would do and think how broken it would be if the sturdy oak on which it hangs were laid low.

I have learned in the great University of Hard Knocks a philosophy that no woman who has had an easy life ever acquires. I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading to-morrow. It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us. I put that dread from me because experience has taught me that when the time comes that I so fear, the strength and wisdom to meet it will be given me.

Little annoyances have no longer the power to affect me. After you have seen your whole edifice of happiness topple and crash in ruins about you, it never matters to you again that a servant forgets to put the doilies under the finger bowls or the cook spills the soup.

I have learned not to expect too much of people and so I can still get happiness out of the friend who isn’t quite true to me, or the acquaintance who gossips about me, and I can even find pleasure in the society of those whose motives I see through.

Above all I have acquired a sense of humor, because there were so many things over which I had either to laugh or cry. And when a woman can joke over her troubles instead of having hysterics, nothing can ever hurt her much again.

So I do not regret the hardships I have known because through them I have touched life at every point. I have lived. And it was worth the price I had to pay.

Dorothy Dix.

Dorothy Dix—Her Book

Dorothy Dix—Her Book

I
HOW A HUSBAND LIKES TO BE TREATED

Altho marriage has been the chief business of woman since Eve pulled off the first wedding in the Garden of Eden, women have not yet mastered the first indispensable principle of success in their profession. Millions of women have been married. Hundreds of thousands of women marry annually, and yet, as a class, women do not know how to treat a husband.

Here and there is a shining exception to this rule, and the result is an inspiring picture of domestic bliss. But the great majority of women still go stumbling along into misery and divorce because they have not had the wit to find out how to rub man’s fur the right way, and make him purr under their hands.

In a word, women fail to strike just the right note in their attitude towards their husbands. Sometimes they treat them better than they deserve. Sometimes worse, but seldom do they treat the men just as the men would like to be treated.

Perhaps the real reason that women fail in this most important particular is because they make the mistake of treating a husband as if he were a rational human being, and the same sort of an individual inside of the home circle that he is outside of it.

Never was there a greater error. The John Smith to whom a woman is married is no more the John Smith of the business world than he is some other man.

The John Smith, who is a lawyer, or a doctor, or a grocer in the outer world, is a big, strong, broad, self-reliant man who looks at everything in a large way, and is just, and tolerant, and even stoical in meeting the vicissitudes of life. The woman who marries him has perceived all of these qualities, and loved him for them, and she naturally expects him to exhibit these characteristics in home life.

Fatal blunder. John Smith, the business man, may be dealt with on a plain, sensible, aboveboard platform, but John Smith the husband, has to be jollied, and cajoled, and petted, and wheedled along the road he should go, if there is anything doing in the domestic felicity line in the household of which he is the alleged head.

Now the majority of husbands average up quite as well as the majority of wives, but even when a man is really good, and true, and strong, experience teaches his wife that there are three ways in which he likes her to treat him. They are:

(a) Like a baby.

(b) Like a demigod.

(c) Like a good fellow.

No matter how big and strong a man is, nor how many other men he bosses, he wants his wife to treat him as if he were a delicate infant who had to be petted, and nursed, and dandled, and chucked under the chin. There isn’t a man living whose secret ideal of a perfect wife isn’t a woman who puts the buttons in his shirt, and lays out his collar and tie in the morning, who has his slippers toasting on the radiator when he comes home of an evening, and who cooks just the particular thing he likes to eat, with her own hands.

Talk about your women who can hand out intellectual companionship! Produce your living pictures! Exhibit your paragons of virtue! They are simply not one, two, three with the wise dame who pets and fusses over her lord and master. And it isn’t because the man really wants his wife to wait on him. That doesn’t enter into it at all. He’s just like the three-year-old who howls for mama to put on his shoes or butter his bread when there are seven nurses standing around to do it.

Men are babyish in wanting their wives to show them off. The expression on the face of little Tommy while his fond mother is telling the smart things that he said, is exactly the same expression that is on Tommy’s father’s face while his wife is bragging about how he organized a trust, or won a big lawsuit, or was elected judge.

Wise,—oh, a daughter of Solomon is the woman who puts her husband through his paces for the benefit of company. Matrimony is one long, glad sweet song in the household of the lady who acts as a showman for hubby.

Consider also a man when he is sick, or thinks he is sick. How does he want to be treated then? Like a baby. He wants his wife to sit by his bed, and hold his hand, and weep tears of sympathy, and if she doesn’t believe he is going to die every time he has a headache, he considers her a cold, heartless icicle and doubts her affection.

Therefore, the very first principle in treating a husband is to treat him as if he was your littlest baby, and if you do, he will gurgle, and coo just as your two-year-old does when you smother him with kisses, and asks: “‘Oose de most booflest boy on earf, an’ mudders itty, pitty wonder, and world beater?”

Secondly, every husband likes to be treated as if he were a demigod.

Men won’t admit it, but in his soul every husband feels that he has conferred such an inestimable boon upon his wife by marrying her that she can never really repay him, anyway, but that it is up to her to keep busy on the job. Therefore, the least she can do is to act grateful.

The real reason why there is a continual conflict in most families over the money question is not because husbands are stingy, but because a man likes to dole the money out, piece by piece, so that the woman who gets it may have a living exhibition of his generosity.

When a man complains about how extravagant his wife is, and how much her hat and dress cost, it doesn’t mean that he begrudges her a single garment or the price thereof. On the contrary, it is his way of boasting to the world of how prosperous he is, and how well he provides for his family. Stupid, indeed, is the woman who does not comprehend this, and who does not keep her glad rags hanging in public, so to speak, and continually beat upon the cymbal, and chant pæans of praise about how good her husband is to provide her with her lovely clothes.

Nor is this as silly as it sounds. The average man gets practically nothing out of his labor, after he has supported his family, but his board and clothes, and it is pretty discouraging to spend your life toiling for those who take all that you can give, and make no sign of appreciation in return. So it is not strange that husbands like their wives to treat them as a beneficent providence from whom all blessings flow.

Husbands like to be treated as good fellows.

If the average married man could put up one prayer more fervent than all the rest it would be this: “Lord, send me a wife who laughs, and a home that isn’t an understudy to a funeral parlor!”

But his prayer isn’t often answered.

Now one of the great reasons why so many husbands and wives make shipwreck of their lives together is because a man is always seeking for happiness, while a woman is on a perpetual still hunt for trouble. When anything uncomfortable happens to a man he tries to forget it, to put it behind him, to get it out of his thoughts, even if he has to drown it in drink. When a misfortune befalls a woman she gloats over it. She keeps pressing her finger on every sore until she makes a raging abscess of it. Then she goes on a jag of tears.

The result of this feminine peculiarity is that the average home is not a cheerful place, nor is the average wife a joyous companion, and that is why a very large number of husbands seek their amusements elsewhere, and with other people. The greatest danger that menaces domesticity is that so many wives are killjoys.

The question is often asked—why do men, who are penurious and niggardly to their families, and who never pay a household bill without grumbling, spend money so lavishly on their vices? The answer is easy. A man’s home is dull, and the money that his family costs him gives him no fillip of pleasure. The other does. The home has been made to mean to him nothing but hard duty, ungilded by any joy. The opening of champagne for chorus girls is to the tune of gaiety and laughter. Therefore, he is willing to pay for one and begrudges paying for the other.

Once I was listening to a group of intelligent people discuss the most desirable quality in a wife. They named the usual standard virtues until suddenly one man burst out in a voice surcharged with genuine emotion.

“I tell you,” he said, “what a man wants in a wife more than anything else is a cheerful companion. Goodness? Bah! All women, at least the kind a man marries, are good. Economy? A man likes to spend money on his wife. Amiability? Who wants a simpering doll always about? Domesticity? Stuff and nonsense. A man’s stomach isn’t the most important part of him. Besides there is a good restaurant on every corner, if he is bound to gorge himself on food.

“I tell you what a man wants is cheerfulness in his wife. He wants to come home at night to somebody who will meet him with a smile, somebody who has got a lot of bright little things to tell him, and who can make him laugh, somebody who is willing to put on her prettiest dress and go out with him if he wants to go to any place of amusement.

“He doesn’t want to come home to a woman who is sodden with tears, or who is running over with the accumulated worries of the day that she dumps on him, who is full of her own and other people’s hard luck stories, and who looks like a chapter of the Lamentations of Jeremiah.”

Of course, whether a wife is melancholy or not does not, from an ethical standpoint, alter her husband’s duty to her. He should be strong enough to love and cherish her no matter how lacrimose she is; but the martyr’s crown is a piece of headgear that is distinctly unfashionable at the present time, and most men duck wearing it. Wherefore, it behooves the Amalgamated Order of Doleful Wives to cheer up, and try to be more lively companions to their husbands if they don’t want those gentlemen to stray off in search of ladies with sunnier dispositions.

As a matter of fact, men are, emotionally, very primitive creatures with a few simple domestic wants. They desire to be petted, and jollied, and looked up to by their wives, and then they want to be treated as good fellows. They want their wives to be chums with them, and not reforming institutions, or lecture bureaus.

The average man simply pines for cheerful comradeship from his wife. He wants her to enjoy the things that he does, to like the people he likes, to amuse herself with the things that divert him. He wants to hear her laugh, to see her eyes sparkle, and for her to treat him as on a par with herself, as if they were joyous fellow sinners together, instead of her being a living reproof to him as a poor low-browed creature, with musical-comedy tastes that make her shudder.

Yet do you ever notice the ordinary married couple out together? It is one of the most piteous sights on earth. The man is spending his money trying to give his wife a good time, and she meets his noble efforts with the rasping qualities of a crosscut saw. That is what gives eternal pungency to the old Weber and Fields joke about the man who, when asked if he was going to take his wife with him on a trip to Paris, replied: “No, I am going on a pleasure excursion.”

Of course whether it is any more a woman’s place to get along with her husband than it is his to get along with her is another fight, which I am not trying to referee here. So also is the question of how a wife likes to be treated. What I have tried to show is how a husband would like his wife to pull the wool over his eyes and put on the velvet glove before she tries to manage him—because men really enjoy being bamboozled by women who turn out a nice artistic job. What they object to is not being henpecked, but the raw way in which their wives do it.

II
CHARM

Over and over again girls ask me these questions: What is charm? What is the secret of the attraction that some women have for men?

What is the “come-hither” look in the eye that some women have that makes every man who beholds it get up and follow them?

Why do some girls always have hosts of beaux flocking about them, while other girls just as good-looking, just as clever, just as good dancers, just as anxious to please, never have a date or a single sweetheart to bless themselves with?

And to all of these questions I have to answer, sadly and disconsolately, that I do not know. I have to give up the conundrum, which is perhaps the riddle that the Sphinx, who is partly a woman, has brooded over through the centuries in her desert solitude, without ever being able to solve it.

In Barrie’s delightful play, “What Every Woman Knows,” Maggie’s brothers, discussing her with the brutal frankness with which brothers approach the subject of a sister, agreed that she wasn’t young, nor brilliant, and that she was homely, yet all the men were after her. Finally one of the brothers said: “But she’s got that damned charm.” And that was that.

When a woman has that damned charm she can snap her fingers in the face of flappers and living pictures, and marry as early and as often as she pleases as is witnessed by the many fat, pie-faced women we all know who have had two, and three, or more, husbands apiece, and who still have a waiting list in case anything untoward and fatal should happen to the gentlemen to whom they are at present united in the holy bonds of matrimony.

But what is this charm, what is this rabbit’s foot that some lucky women carry, and others do not? To say that it is personality is to attempt to explain one mystery by another mystery, for we do not know in what personal magnetism consists, or by what power one individual draws us, while another repulses us.

We know that it isn’t beauty, because the best lookers among girls are seldom the most popular, and men who profess to worship beauty are generally content to adore it from a safe distance, and show no disposition to marry it. It is notorious that beauties seldom make good matches. Nor does charm consist of intelligence. Being a highbrow booms no woman’s stock, socially or matrimonially, while a witty woman cuts her throat with her own tongue.

To be a spellbinder is for a girl’s fairy godmother to have wished a curse instead of a blessing upon her, for no woman is more anathema to men than the human phonograph. Even dancing, chief of accomplishments in these jazzy days when it is of more profit for a woman to have her brains in her heels than in her head, is but a passing attraction, while amiability and a sweet nature, woman’s traditional one best bet, are like a sticking plaster, potent to hold a man after marriage, but of small value in luring him into it.

Undoubtedly, charm in its perfection is a gift of the gods, but happily, in these days, when nature proves a cruel stepmother who is so mean and stingy that she does not give us all that is coming to us, we have learned to circumvent the lady. No woman need be as ugly as God made her, nor as unattractive as she was born. Drug-store complexions can put the inherited ones to the blush, and any girl who is willing to take the trouble can acquire a line of lures and graces that will make any bona fide siren tremble for her job. To the girl, then, who wishes to acquire charm, and who especially wishes to attract men, I would say, first, stress your femininity.

I don’t mean be namby-pamby and weepy and dish-raggy, without any backbone. That type of woman has gone out of fashion as completely as bustles and hoopskirts. No man now would be bored with the sort of perfect lady his grandmother was. But the eternal feminine remains still the eternal attraction for men, and the more womanly a woman is, the gentler, the tenderer, the sweeter, the more she appeals to men. If you will notice when a man speaks of the woman he loves, he invariably calls her “little” no matter if she is six feet high and weighs 200 pounds. What he means is that she gives him the reaction of depending upon him, of looking up to him, and that in some subtle way she flatters his vanity by giving him the sense of masculine superiority.

You never see an aggressive, double-fisted woman, who fights her way as a man does, get anywhere. And in his soul every man adores frills and furbelows, and likes to see women dolled up. That is why girls make such a terrible mistake when they ape mannish ways, and wear mannish clothes. When a girl puts on knickerbockers she throws her trump card into the discard.

To the girl who wishes to acquire charm I would also whisper this secret: Make of yourself a mirror in which other people look upon themselves. Especially let men see a flattering reflection of themselves in your eyes. Can your own personal vanity. Listen with bated breath while other people tell you of their exploits, but never mention your own. Enthuse over their cars, their dogs. Marvel at their adventures. Sympathize with their disappointments. Give the glad hand to their successes, and you will be universally regarded as a woman of perfect taste, wonderful insight, profound judgment, a brilliant talker and a companion of whom one could never weary. It is the tireless listeners, and not the endless talkers, whom men take out to dinner.

To the girl who wishes to develop charm I would likewise earnestly recommend an intensive course of self-analysis. I would say to her: “Study yourself. Find out what you can wear and what you cannot wear. Find out the things that you can do and get away with, and the things that you cannot do without making yourself appear either a dumbbell or a figure of fun. Then, having ascertained what are your best points, turn the spotlight on them. Emphasize them until you make everybody sit up and take notice, so that even casual acquaintances will remember you as the girl who always wears pink, or the girl who always dresses in black, or the girl with the Mona Lisa smile, or the girl who is so jolly and such a cut-up, or the girl who listens to you with such an absorbed expression on her face that you could go on talking to her forever. I would urge girls to try to be themselves, plus, as they say in business, and to raise whatever charms of body, or mind, or heart, they have to its nth power. That is the best way to acquire personality, the “something different” about us that sets us apart from every other human being, instead of our being just one of the herd.

Don’t be a copycat. Don’t understudy the mannerisms of another girl just because she happens to be popular. Imitation airs and graces have about as much sparkle to them as imitation diamonds. Besides, you never can make a go of it. You can’t put on another woman’s characteristics any more than you can her clothes, and make them seem as if they were your own birthday suit. They are always a grotesque misfit. Charm has to be made to order and cut to the measurement of the individual. That is why one girl may do bold, outrageous things and everybody only shrugs his shoulders and laughs at her, while another girl is sent to Coventry for not doing half so much. That is why some women always have a masculine shoulder offered for them to weep upon, while men tell other women not to be fools whenever they shed a tear.

So the trick is for the girl to find out what her own class is and qualify for the blue ribbon in that instead of trying to force her way into a bunch of prize winners where she doesn’t belong and where she will be thrown out by the judges. Yet many girls make the mistake of doing this very thing. A quiet, serious-minded, mouse-like little girl observes that some gay and dashing girl, who has quicksilver in her veins and over whose lips laughter bubbles as spontaneously as a mountain spring, is much admired and sought after and is the life of the party wherever she goes.

“Aha! Vivacity is what makes a girl popular,” says the demure one to herself. “I will also be sprightly, and merry, and make a hit.”

So she tries to imitate the high spirits of the gay girl, but she can’t do it. Her home-made vivacity is as flat as home-brew beer beside imported champagne. Instead of being bright, she is loud. Instead of laughing, she giggles. Instead of being sprightly, she jumps around like a monkey on a stick. She is so afraid she won’t talk enough that she chatters incessantly, and instead of amusing people she bores them to death.

Yet the very girl who is such a failure as a live wire could have charmed every one if only she had given a master performance of girlish sweetness, and gentleness, and quietness. She could have been a great success if she had remained the shrinking violet that nature made her, but she was a rank failure as a gaudy sunflower.

Then there is the big, Amazonian woman who tries to be cute and cunning, because she sees some baby doll getting the glad hand when she curls up on sofas, and sits on one foot, and perches on the edges of tables, and who only succeeds in looking like a performing elephant instead of a playful kitten when she performs these stunts. And there is the woman without an inch of funny bone in her whole anatomy who tries to tell good stories because she sees some jolly woman raconteur set the table in a roar at dinner parties, and who wonders why people burst into tears instead of into peals of mirth when she recites her carefully memorized jokes.

They couldn’t fill other women’s rôles, yet the big woman could have made us worship her as a goddess if she had stayed on her pedestal instead of coming down and trying to do double somersaults in the ring. We would have listened eagerly enough to intelligent talk from a serious thinker who didn’t try to be funny, for Heaven knows we get tired enough of amateur jokesmiths who think we want to be perpetually tickled in the ribs. Believe me, girls, there is much wisdom in the old proverb that advises the shoemaker to stick to his last. We are most admirable when we are what nature made us with the aid of a few little arts and embellishments to throw the original model up into higher relief. So I counsel you to make the most of yourselves. Abandon the foolish attempt of trying to make yourselves over into a poor copy of some woman who is admired. Charm isn’t standardized. It has a million forms, and every woman should illustrate her own particular version of it.

After all what we call charm is largely a matter of personality and the girl who wishes to cultivate that elusive something that we call personality does well to pay much attention to her dress. This sounds like superfluous advice to the sex whose brains are mostly cut on the bias and shirred in the middle, and which is more concerned over the hang of a skirt than it is over the state of its immortal soul. It is not too much to say that three-fourths of women’s thoughts and interest in life and heart-felt desires and envies are concentrated upon clothes, and the marvel always is that they can put so much effort on a subject and get such poor results.

For the great majority of women only think of dress in terms of fashion, and they follow the mode of the moment as sheep follow their leader over a wall. They wear blue or purple, pink or green, short skirts or long skirts, tight ones or full ones, without any reference to their complexions or whether their ankles are sylphlike or like the legs of a piano, or whether they are living skeletons, or have featherbed figures. The result is that thousands upon thousands of women look as if their worst enemy had bought their clothes, and their hats are a premeditated insult to their faces. But they go their way, serene and happy, having done the worst they could by themselves, but blissful in the knowledge that they are wearing what everybody else is wearing. Apparently it never enters the average woman’s head that by clothing herself in the feminine uniform of the hour she makes herself indistinguishable in the mob, or that she could call attention to herself by breaking away from it, and dressing to suit her own particular type. Still less does it occur to her that her clothes offer her an invaluable mode of self-expression, and that by them she can emphasize her good points and camouflage her defects.

Yet every moving picture, every play she sees, offers a girl an object lesson in the psychology of clothes that she does not heed. She never asks herself why the innocent, trusting maiden, too artless for her own good, always wears a white muslin and a blue sash; why the ingenue is always a mass of fluffy ruffles; why the betrayed heroine always wears a slinky black dress; why the adventuress is clothed in crimson and spangles; why the vamp invariably wears long jade earrings, and a quart of beads, and very little else.

Yet astute stage managers have found that the surest way to make an audience visualize a woman in a certain way is to have her dress the part. A girl might, of course, be as innocent in a crimson dress as a white one; a woman might be as heartbroken in a pink silk and lace negligee as she is in a bedraggled black alpaca, but it would take a long argument to convince us of it, and we wouldn’t weep nearly as freely over her woes as we do when we get an eyeful of her in the clothes that tell us at once just what a poor, innocent, persecuted heroine she is.

Surely this should suggest to every girl the wisdom of retiring to her closet, and having a heart-to-heart session with her wardrobe, and a vivisection party with her character, and thereby try to find out how to dress her soul as well as her body, so as best and most effectively to press-agent her individuality, so to speak.

If she is of the bold and dashing type, let her flaunt herself like a sunflower in daring costumes and flaming colors, but if she is of the quiet and gentle sort, soft fabrics, chiffons and laces and pastel shades belong to her, and make her look like the traditional modest violet that every man dreams of securing as a wife. Let the girl who is flat-chested and athletic rejoice in her sport clothes. That is her note, and brings out a certain piquant boyishness which is her greatest attraction. But let the girl who is plump, with gracious curves, make the most of her femininity by decking herself out in the frilliest frocks that she can find. Each will lose in charm if she swaps her plumage for the other’s.

Dangling ornaments, floating ribbons and jingling bracelets belong to the gay and foolish and frivolous, but they detract from the dignity of the stately, thoughtful, serious-minded woman. A tailor-made suit is equal to a certificate of virtue, and when a girl is applying for a job a plain, dark-colored suit will do more to land her the position than a gilt-edged reference. Nobody ever believes that a girl in a low-necked, no-sleeved frock can ever be a competent business woman. She doesn’t look it. Every woman knows that her eyes seem twice as blue if she has a blue lining to her hat, and that she can turn a spotlight on her every freckle by wearing a spotted dress. In the same way she can bring out her characteristics by the way she dresses. If she wishes to emphasize her cuteness, she can do it by dressing like a baby doll. If she wishes to be thought a goddess, she can add to her divinity by long-trailing robes. If she wishes to be thought a good sport and treated as a pal by men, sport clothes are hers, while if domesticity is her long suit, she can turn the trick by wearing ruffled little white aprons at home. So study your type, girls, and dress the part, if you want to make the most of the attractions with which nature has endowed you.

III
THE ORDINARY WOMAN

I wish that I had the distributing of some of the Carnegie medals for heroes. I would give one to just the Ordinary Woman. It is true that she never manned a lifeboat in a stormy sea, or plunged into a river to save a drowning person. It is true that she never stopped a runaway horse, or dashed into a burning building, or gave any other spectacular exhibition of courage.

She has only stood at her post thirty, or forty, or fifty years, fighting sickness and poverty and loneliness, and disappointment so quietly, with such a Spartan fortitude that the world has never noticed her achievements. Yet, in the presence of the Ordinary Woman, the battle-scarred veteran, with his breast covered with medals signifying valor, may well stand uncovered before one braver than he.

There is nothing high and heroic in her appearance. She is just a commonplace woman, plainly dressed, with a tired face and work-worn hands—the kind of woman that you meet a hundred times a day upon the street without ever giving her a second glance, still less saluting her as a heroine. Nevertheless, as much as the bravest soldier, she is entitled to the cross of the Legion of Honor for distinguished gallantry on the Battlefield of Life.

Years and years ago, when she was fresh and young, and gay, and light-hearted, she was married. Her head, as is the case with most girls, was full of dreams. Her husband was to be a Prince Charming, always tender and considerate and loving, shielding her from every care and worry. Life itself was to be a fairy tale.

One by one the dreams fell away. The husband was a good man, but he grew indifferent to her before long. He ceased to notice when she put on a fresh ribbon. He never paid her the little compliments for which a woman’s soul hungers. He never gave her a kiss or a caress, and their married life sank into a deadly monotony that had no romance to brighten it, no joy or love to lighten it.

Day after day she sewed and cooked and cleaned and mended to make a comfortable home for a man who did not even give her the poor pay of a few words of appreciation. At his worst he was cross and querulous. At his best he was silent, and would gobble his food like a hungry animal and subside into his paper, leaving her to spend a dull and monotonous evening after a dull and monotonous day.

The husband was not one of the fortunate few who have the gift of making money. He worked hard, but opportunity does not smile on every man, and the wolf was never very far away from their door.

Women know the worst of poverty. It is the wife, who has the spending of the insufficient family income, who learns all the bitter ways of scrimping and paring and saving. The husband must present a decent appearance, for policy’s sake, when he goes to business; certain things are necessities for the children; and so the heaviest of all the deprivations fall upon the woman who stays at home and strives to make one dollar do the work of five.

That is the way of the Ordinary Woman; and what sacrifices she makes, what tastes she crucifies, what longings for pretty things and dainty things she smothers, not even her own family guess. They think it is an eccentricity that makes her choose the neck of the chicken and the hard end of the loaf and to stay at home from any little outing. Ah, if they only knew!

For each of her children she trod the Gethsemane of woman, only to go through that slavery of motherhood which the woman endures who is too poor to hire competent nurses. For years and years she never knew what it was to have a single night’s unbroken sleep. The small hours of the morning found her walking the colic, or nursing the croup, or covering restless little sleepers, or putting water to thirsty little lips.

There was no rest for her, day or night. There was always a child in her arms or clinging to her skirts. Oftener than not she was sick and nerve-worn and weary almost to death, but she never failed to rally to the call of “Mother!” as a good soldier rallies to his battle-cry.

Nobody called her brave, and yet, when one of the children came down with malignant diphtheria, she braved death a hundred times, in bending over the little sufferer, without one thought of danger. And when the little one was laid away under the sod, she who had loved most was the first to gather herself together and take up the burden of life for the others.

The supreme moment of the Ordinary Woman’s life, however, came when she educated her children above herself and lifted them out of her sphere. She did this with deliberation. She knew that in sending her bright boy and talented girl off to college she was opening up to them paths in which she could not follow; she knew that the time would come when they would look upon her with pitying tolerance or contempt, or perhaps—God help her!—be ashamed of her.

But she did not falter in her self-sacrifice. She worked a little harder, she denied herself a little more, to give them the advantages that she never had. In this she was only like millions of other Ordinary Women who are toiling over cooking-stoves, slaving at sewing-machines, pinching and economizing to educate and cultivate their children—digging with their own hands the chasm that will separate them almost as much as death itself would.

Wherefore I say the Ordinary Woman is the real heroine of life.

IV
TEACH THE CHILDREN TO LOVE FATHER

Are you teaching your children to love and admire their father? Do you ceaselessly point out to your children their father’s good qualities? Do you hold their father up as a hero before your children’s eyes? Do you teach your children to appreciate their father? If you do not, you are not giving your husband a fair deal, nor a run for his money. Fatherhood calls for just as many sacrifices as motherhood does. The only coin in which these can be repaid is affection and gratitude, and if he is defrauded of these he is poor indeed.

From the time the first baby is born the average man becomes literally the slave of his family. He sells himself into bondage so that his children may live soft; that they may have advantages that he never had in his youth; that they may enjoy luxuries he never knew. He works overtime and grows prematurely old and bent, that his boys may go to college and belong to smart clubs and have automobiles, and that his daughters may attend fashionable schools, and dress like fashion plates, and go in the right circles.

It is father who stays at home and works through hot summers and cold winters, when the family goes to Europe. It is father who wears the shabbiest clothes. It is father who has the worst room and the smallest closet space in the home. The percentage of money that father spends on himself and in gratifying his own personal tastes and desires is negligible. Virtually all the money he has earned by a lifetime of hard toil has been lavished on his family.

Whether this pays or not, whether all of this labor and anxiety and self-denial have been worthless or not, depends altogether on his children’s attitude toward him. If they love him; if they are grateful to him; if they appreciate what he has done for them, it is the best investment that a man ever made, and it makes him richer than any millionaire. But if his children are indifferent and callous; if they take all that he has done for them as no more than their due, and without even a “thank you”; if they see in him nothing but a shabby little man who hasn’t been particularly successful as a moneymaker, then all his life work goes for nothing. His sacrifices are without reward. He is bankrupt in heart.

Now, the attitude of children toward their father is almost entirely determined by their mother; and whether they look upon him as a superior being to be adored and worshiped, or merely as a cash register that they can punch whenever they want any money, depends altogether upon what she has taught them. There are women who teach their children to hate and fear their father by making him an ogre to them. When the children are bad the little culprits are always threatened with what their father will do to them. The mother thus makes the father the hanging judge who inflicts punishment on the small sinners.

In this way the mother fills the child’s imagination with a picture of its father as of some dread creature who is always lying in wait to chastise him, and who could never have any sympathy or understanding with him, and with whom he could never have any possible companionship.

“I’ll tell your father on you when he comes home,” is the curse that millions of women lay between their children and their husbands, and that seals the children’s hearts forever against the fathers who have given them their very life blood.

There are other women who teach their children to regard their fathers simply as money-making machines that exist solely for their own use and benefit. What the children want they must have at any cost to father, and mother undertakes to nag it out of him. The children see that mother has no consideration for father and they grow up to have none.

She never tells them that they must not even ask for something they desire because business is bad and their father is harassed and worried about money. She never tells them that they must stay at home and let father have a little trip, because he is sick and nerve-worn. She lets them wring the last penny out of him with no more feeling for him than if he were some sort of automatic device worked by her for supplying their desires and needs.

Other women teach their children to despise their fathers by always criticizing them and calling attention to their faults. They are forever telling the children that their fathers are lacking in enterprise, that they are poor business men, that they are too easy and let people take advantage of them, that they are high-tempered and hard to get along with, that they have this and that weakness, until the child’s mind is thoroughly poisoned with the idea that his father amounts to nothing and his opinions are not to be respected.

Very few women ever deliberately set themselves to teach their children to love and appreciate their fathers. Very few women ever try to make their children see their fathers as heroes who, for their sakes, are fighting the battle of life as bravely and gallantly as any knight of old. Very few women teach their children to show any gratitude to the fathers who have sacrificed so much for them. Why so many women fail in this important duty is partly through carelessness and a lack of thought, but mostly because of an unconscious mother jealousy. They want to be first with their children and monopolize their love. But it is a cruel thing to the child, and to the father. It robs them both of so much joy in each other that they miss.

V
STRIKE A BALANCE WITH MATRIMONY

I get hundreds upon hundreds of letters from disgruntled wives bemoaning their fates. They tell me that they are sick and weary of the monotony of domestic drudgery; that they have few amusements; that their husbands are indifferent to them and never pay them any compliments or show them any affection; that their husbands find fault with them for their every mistake, but never give them one word of praise for all the good work they do.

And these women have brooded over the hardships of their lot until they have grown morbid and they see the world as one great gob of gloom, with themselves as the blackest spot in it.

Without doubt, marriage is a cruel and a bitter disappointment to nine-tenths of those who enter into the holy estate. Especially is it disillusioning to women because they build such impossible hopes upon it, and go into it with such a blind faith that they are going to find it an earthly paradise.

It is incredible, but it is true, that despite her lifelong knowledge of the daily life her mother has led and her observation of the domestic strife in the households of her married friends and neighbors, every girl honestly believes that her own matrimonial venture will be a perpetual picnic, and that the man she marries will remain the perfect lover.

Of course, it doesn’t happen, and when the woman finds out that her own marriage brings her more kicks than ha’pence; when she realizes that she must share the common lot; when she has to bend her back to the hard and dreary labor of making a family comfortable, for which she gets neither the glad hand nor a pay envelope, and when she has to put up with a man who seems to have cornered the whole visible supply of pure cussedness, why, it gets upon her nerves, and she feels like flunking it.

So she beats upon her breast and cries out that this is not the marriage of which she dreamed. This sordid existence is not what she married for.

Of course, it isn’t. But it is marriage as it is. None of us realize our ideals. Our dreams never come true. And even when we get what we want, it is so warped and twisted that it is no longer the object of our desires, and we have paid for it more than it is worth. That is life.

To these unhappy wives I would offer this bit of homely counsel:

Sit down, sisters, and have a real heart-to-heart session with your own souls. Put out of your mind firmly and for all time the idiotic idea that there is any lot of perfect peace and happiness, any road you might have traveled that is not strewn with tacks. Worry and anxiety and sickness and sorrow and disappointment and loneliness are the portion alike of the highest and the lowest, and you cannot escape the human lot. It is life.

Then take a calm and dispassionate survey of your own situation. You will find your work tiresome and monotonous. So does every other person in the world find his or hers. The thing we do for our daily bread is bound to become a grind. Do you think for a moment that the banker doesn’t get sick and weary of grappling with credits and loans; that the author doesn’t have to flog himself to his desk; that the actor doesn’t weary of the lines he has said over thousands of times; that the film star is not nauseated with grease paint?

Every one thrills to his task at first as you did to your new pots and pans and bridal furniture. But the novelty wears off, and then comes the long, grim stretch of carrying on, because it is your job to which you have set your hand and which you mean to make a good job just because it is yours. That is life.

You complain that your husband takes your good work as a matter of course, but he howls loud and long over your mistakes. That is what happens to all workers. If you were a stenographer and spelled one word wrong; if you were a saleswoman and made one error in your calculations, your boss would pass over the thousands of words you had spelled correctly and the hundreds of good sales you had made, to call you down for your blunder.

If you were a writer or an actor, you would find that the critics would forget all the good work you had done to call attention to the weakness of your new book, or bemoan the performance you gave in a new part. As long as we walk straight no one notices it, but when we fall off the path we attract attention. It is life.

These unhappy wives ask, “What shall I do?” and one knows not how to answer the question. To tell them that, if they are patient and forbearing, and go on doing their duty as wives, they can change mean husbands into good ones is to tell them a wicked lie, and mislead them with false hopes. The leopard changes his spots just about as often as a man does his disposition, and I have yet to see the tightwad become generous; the surly, glum man turn into a ray of sunshine in his home; or the hard, cold, selfish man become the perfect lover to his wife.

Nor is divorce the solution of the unhappy wife’s problem. Marriage is not an episode of which you can say when you get a divorce, “This unpleasant chapter of my life is ended. I will shut the book, and forget all about it, and be perfectly happy henceforth.” Marriage sets its ineffaceable seal upon a woman, it colors her whole life; and divorce can no more give her back her lost joy, and faith, and trust, than it can restore her lost girlhood.

Besides, there are nearly always children to consider; children whose welfare a good mother places above her own; children for whom a home must be kept together; children who must be educated; who must be started in life, who need a father’s support and control. Divorce is not for the woman with children unless conditions are absolutely intolerable. And for the woman herself divorce is often a jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, for when she finds that she is rid of an unkind husband, she has to face a world that is unkinder still. Generally the woman has no private fortune. The courts award her but a meager alimony, and the collecting of that is generally about the hardest job on earth. She is trained to no business or occupation. Nobody wants her services, and she comes to know that the grumbling of an ill-tempered husband is no harder to endure than the howl of the wolf outside of her door.

Perhaps the best advice that one can offer these unhappy wives is to try to forget what they expected of marriage, and to just put it on a business basis, so much for so much, with a settled determination to make the best of a bad bargain. Their little flier in Heart’s Consolidated hasn’t paid the dividends they expected it to. Well, our speculations seldom do. Their matrimonial partners have proved hard to get along with. Well, many business men endure cranky men partners, who rasp their nerves, for the sake of the good of the firm.

And on the credit side of the ledger the unhappy wife can set this down, that she has, at least, her home, and her settled position in society, and they are great gain. It takes years and years of struggle and striving for the lone woman to reach the goal where she can have her own house, and gather about her the household gods that women worship, and that bless one by their presence.

I am not arguing that a woman would consider a house, no matter if it were a palace, a satisfactory substitute for a tender, loving husband, but I am trying to induce the woman who has an indifferent husband to realize that she is not half as badly off as she thinks she is, as long as she has her creature comforts.

Fortunately, the law of compensation always holds. The man who is a poor husband is often a good provider. Flirtatious husbands often atone for their sidesteppings with diamonds and furs. Stingy ones leave women rich widows. Even grouches leave their wives free to amuse themselves in their own way. After all, life is a series of compromises. If we don’t get the best, we are very foolish to throw away the second best and the wise woman who finds marriage a failure doesn’t go into physical and spiritual bankruptcy. She gets the best out of what she has. She makes the most of her bargain.

All of which just boils down into this: Dry your eyes on your best embroidered towels, O ye disgruntled sisters, and realize that you are not so unfortunate as you think you are, and what you are called upon to bear is just life.

VI
JEALOUSY

A woman wants to know if there is any cure for jealousy. She says that she knows her husband loves her devotedly. He is true and faithful to her. He is as domesticated as the house cat and casts no roving eye at the pretty flappers. Nevertheless, every time he speaks to another woman she endures grinding torments of suspicion.

There is only one cure for jealousy. That is to use a little common sense, but this puts the remedy out of the reach of the green-eyed, because jealousy is a form of insanity.

It is a lack of mental balance that makes people imagine things that do not exist, that causes them to see deep, dark plots in the most innocent acts and that makes them deliberately torture themselves by believing that the ones that they love most are traitors to them. Also, it is what the alienists call “the exaggerated ego” that makes any man or woman believe that he or she can supply another individual’s whole need of human companionship.

For jealousy isn’t confined solely to lovers. Some of the most acute attacks are the jealousy that men and women feel for their in-laws. Sometimes parents are even jealous of their own children. Wives are often jealous of their husband’s business, and always jealous of the old friends of their bachelor days. But however and wherever it is, and no matter how causeless and needless it may be, jealousy poisons the life and ruins the happiness of all of those who indulge in it. It is the source of endless quarrels between husbands and wives, and it slays love quicker than any other one thing. Indeed, the jealous bring down the curse they fear upon their own heads.

By their suspicions the jealous materialize the very thing they most dread, for there is no surer way of driving a man or a woman into philandering than by keeping dangling continually before his or her eyes a romantic possibility in which he or she is likely to indulge at any moment. Many a married man would never think of himself as a lady-killer—in fact, he would consider that he was married and settled, and done with sentimental episodes, except that his wife keeps alive his belief in himself as a heart-smasher by her jealousy. If she considers him so fascinating that she is afraid to let him have a casual conversation with another woman, or take a turn around a ballroom floor with a pretty girl, he argues that he must be some sheik. And so he buys him some Klassy Kut Kollege Klothes and sets his hat on the side of his head and proceeds to justify her once groundless suspicions.

Furthermore, jealousy is its own undoing, because it strikes a death blow at our personal liberty, which is dearer to us and more necessary to our happiness than any man or woman ever is. None of us likes to be called upon to furnish an alibi. None of us enjoys being put through a questionnaire about everything that was said to us and everything we said. None of us but resents not being free to go and come as we like within reasonable bounds and to hold ordinary social intercourse with any one we choose. So if husbands and wives went about deliberately to kill every particle of affection that their mates have for them, they could take no better way to do it than by spying upon them, by attributing unworthy motives to them, by curtailing their freedom and by making such jealous scenes that, for the sake of peace, they are forced to lie and deceive. Besides, jealousy is an unforgivable insult.

There are women who have conniption fits every time their husbands make themselves agreeable to their dinner partners or take a chance-met old woman friend out to lunch. There are wives who never believe that their husbands can admire a beautiful woman or enjoy the society of a brilliant one innocently. They attribute the basest motives to the men they love and accuse them not only of being faithless, but of the grossest animalism, which was far and away from the thoughts of the poor gentlemen.

Finally, jealousy is an indication of the inferiority complex. The woman who is jealous of all other women in her heart believes them all her superiors. She believes them better looking, more intelligent, more charming, with more attraction for her husband than she has. That is why she is so afraid of their getting him away from her. You can’t imagine a queen being jealous of a milkmaid or a Lillian Russell being jealous of an ugly duckling, or a star dancer not being willing to have her husband to tread a measure with some lump of a girl who would walk all over his feet. All of this being true, then, the way to cure jealousy is to apply common sense to the situation. Try to look at it fairly and squarely. In the first place, your husband or wife wouldn’t have married you if he or she hadn’t preferred you to every one else in the world. If you had charm before marriage you have it still, if you will take the trouble to use it. In the second place, you know that you enjoy talking to other people, and that your contact with them is perfectly harmless. Why not believe your husband or wife is as decent as you are? In the third place, why keep your husband or wife always fed up with the idea that he or she is a fascinator that no woman or man can resist? It makes them want to try and see if they can stand them up. And lastly, if you are married to a man or woman whom you believe to have so little truth and honor, and who cares so little for you that he or she can’t be trusted out of your sight, why worry about him or about her? He or she isn’t worth a single pang of jealousy.

VII
HAVE A GOAL

The great trouble with the majority of women is that they have no plan of life, no real objective. They are the victims of fads. They wobble about from interest to interest. The thing they were crazy about yesterday they throw into the discard to-day. They waste their time, and energy, and ability in pursuing will-o’-the-wisps. Like the hero of the popular song, they are on their way, but they don’t know where they are going.

This is why so many women fail, as is abundantly proved by the fact that when a woman does make up her mind about what she wants to do, when she has one settled ambition instead of a lot of vague desires, she is almost invariably successful. Let her once determine to tread a definite path and she not only arrives, but she arrives with bells on.

Of course, the reason that women tackle the business of existence in this hit-or-miss fashion is not really their fault, poor dears. It is because of the idiotic way in which we bring up girls on the assumption that each one has a regiment of fairy godmothers and guardian angels looking after her and taking care of her, so that she doesn’t need to bother her pretty little head about learning how to take care of herself. So we don’t teach a girl, as we do a boy, that our lives are just what we make them, that we are the architects of our own fate, and that whether our lives are ugly, and botchy, and of little worth, or beautiful, and well-rounded, and valuable, depends upon our having some plan of life in our heads and working to it.

We tell the boy that he who is jack-of-all-trades is good at none, and that if he wishes to be a carpenter, or a master plumber, or a bank president, or a surgeon, he must serve his apprenticeship in his chosen trade or profession and concentrate on the study of it if he means to succeed. He will never get anywhere as long as he goes from job to job and dabbles first at one thing and then at another. But we don’t teach girls that it is just as important for them to have some definite plan of life and prepare themselves to do some particular work as it is for their brothers. Most girls in these days have to earn their own living until they are married. But most of them do just as little work as they can get by with, and they do this little aimlessly.

Here and there is a stenographer who works by a plan. She has set herself to become a highly paid private secretary. Here and there is a shop-girl who has her eye on a buyer’s job and trips to Europe. Here and there is a milliner or a dressmaker whose dream is of her own shop. Here and there is a boarding-house keeper whose ambition it is to run a hotel. Very seldom do these women fail to attain their desires. They know what they are trying to do and they make every lick of work count. They bend every energy to one end instead of wasting it on a hundred ineffectual endeavors. They put their backs, their hearts, their brains into their work and that combination invariably spells success.

But the great majority of working women simply potter purposelessly along. They don’t expect to do what they are doing very long, and so they don’t take the trouble to try to learn how to do it well. They have no interest in their work, no ambition. They haven’t even bothered to pick out the thing to do for which they have a natural aptitude. They have taken up the occupation they follow just because they happened to do so. They don’t give a single lobe of their brain to studying it or trying to fit themselves to be competent. They take life as casually as that. Yet they may have to do this same work for thirty or forty years, for it is by no means certain that every girl will get a husband or that the husband will be able to support her if she does get him.

Women do not even have any plan about following the great career of wifehood and motherhood to which they all look forward. Probably every girl who goes to the altar desires to be a good wife and mother. But she does not crystallize these vague intentions into any concrete plan of action. Not one woman in a thousand sits down in her bridal bungalow or apartment and works out a scheme for handling her husband without friction, for running her house economically and for making her marriage a success. On the contrary, she trusts it all to luck. If she is a good housekeeper, she feeds her husband well. If she doesn’t like to cook, she gives him dyspepsia by sitting him down to dinners of underdone meat and overdone bread and watery vegetables. If she is amiable and good-natured, she gets along with him. If she is high tempered, she rows with him. If she is thrifty, she saves his money and they prosper. If she is extravagant, she runs him into debt.

It is because wives have no plan about what they do as wives that matrimony is such a gamble. And it is the same way about motherhood. There is no other thought in the world so terrible as that mothers bring up their children without any plan about what they are trying to make them. They are shaping an immortal soul, and they don’t even know what they are trying to make of it. That is the capital crime of aimlessness. Women will never succeed until they conquer this weakness and learn how to plan their lives. You cannot do anything effectively unless you know what you are trying to do.

VIII
THE GOAT FAMILY

Kind reader, meet my friends, the Goats. They are not rich, for, altho Mr. Goat has been an able and energetic business man all his life, and Mrs. Goat has been a thrifty housekeeper, they have never been able to get much ahead because they have always had such a horde of parasites to support. Ever since they had a home they have run a free hotel. They have literally been eaten out of house and home by self-invited guests, by forty-seventh cousins who always cashed in the blood relationship for board and lodging, and by old friends who suddenly remembered, when they happened to be in their town, how they loved the Goats and hated to pay for their own beds and meals.

Any one of their many acquaintances who wished to take a vacation without expense, or have an operation performed, or go to the opera, or see the sights of the city, just wished himself or herself on the Goats, and arrived bag and baggage to camp in the spare bedroom. And that was all there was to it; a pleasant and economical arrangement so far as the guests were concerned. And if it was inconvenient to the Goats and they had to sleep around on cots and do without new clothes to pay for the food that the deadbeats gobbled up, why, nobody bothered about that. And the Goats never complained. They never made a move to chuck these grafters out, not even rich Cousin Susan, who could have bought the family up a hundred times over, when she came and stayed six months, wore Mother Goat to a frazzle waiting on her and ran them into debt because she couldn’t eat anything but the most expensive foods. No, they feel that it would be a stain on their escutcheon to assert themselves and look out for themselves a little, and so they lived up to the Goat coat-of-arms, which is a doormat couchant, with everybody trampling over it.

By and by the eldest Miss Goat got married. Her husband proved to be a bumptious, egotistical, opinionated fellow, and when he was about the whole Goat family had to walk on eggs and suppress all their own opinions and tastes to avoid irritating him. Indeed, when their daughter married, the Goats acquired a new son, as the phrase goes, because every Sunday and on high days and holidays the young couple arrived to take dinner with papa and mamma. It was so sweet to be all together at such times, and it was also so economical and saved them the work and worry of getting their own dinner. Then the son Billy got married. Not being born a Goat, Billy’s wife had not the suffer-and-be-strong complex in her. On the contrary, she was a go-getter, and what she wanted she had to have. Therefore, Father Goat was often called on for money to help pay Mrs. Billy’s bills, which had to be met regardless of what sacrifice it entailed on the Goats at home.

Mrs. Billy died, and, of course, Billy took his motherless children, one of them a tiny baby, back home for mother and sister to take care of. They did it for a few years, until Billy married again, altho it reduced poor, worn-out mother to a physical wreck. The family didn’t approve of Billy’s choice of a second wife, but, with the Goat faculty for swallowing anything, they accepted her and felt that at least one burden would be removed from them and that Billy would take his children and set up his own home.

It appears, however, that the second wife refuses to be bothered with stepchildren, and so Billy has brought his brood back for mother and sister to rear and support. It takes all the money he can make to provide for his wife and her relatives whom she has saddled upon him.

Mother Goat says that no sacrifice is too great to make for her darling son, nor does she hesitate to offer up as a burnt offering her unmarried daughter, Nanny Goat, who labors in an office all day to make the money to help maintain the family, and who comes home at night and does most of the housework.

But Nanny is beginning to show un-Goatlike traits. She doesn’t see why she should work to feed a lot of bum company who sponge on them instead of paying their own board somewhere. She doesn’t see why she should spend her Sundays and holidays, cooking dinners for sister and brother and the in-laws when they might just as well eat at home or go to a restaurant. And she doesn’t see what right brother has to foist the care of his children and their support on his old parents and his young sister.

“I am spending my life slaving for other people and bearing other people’s burdens,” wails poor little Nanny Goat. “I earn a good salary, but I can never have any pretty clothes or indulge myself in any of the amusements I crave, because all my money is spent on people who just make a convenience of us, and who think more of being invited somewhere else to tea than they do of living on us without cost for a month. All my youth, when I ought to have the pleasures of the young, is being given to trying to raise my brother’s children, and do for them the things that he himself is too weak and pusillanimous to do. And I am sick and tired of it. I am tired of supporting grafters that are more able to work than I am. I am sick of being bled white by blood-suckers. I am sore at having to do other people’s duty for them, and I want to know how I can get out of being a perpetual Goat as long as I live.”

Alas! poor little Nanny, it is easier for the leopard to change its spots than it is for one who was born a Goat to cease being one. Still, the thing can be done, if you have nerve enough to butt your way to freedom. Shut the door in the face of the deadbeat visitors. Make your brother act the part of a man and assume his own responsibilities. And you will find that you have gained not only relief but that you have gone up a hundred per cent in every one’s esteem.

For while we all make use of the Goat family, we hold them in contempt because they let us make goats of them.

IX
SPOILING A WIFE

A man asks: “Can a husband be too good to his wife?” Yes. A husband can be too good to his wife. So can a wife be too good to her husband. Husbands and wives are just as easily spoiled as babies are, and they react to spoiling exactly the same way that babies do. They become peevish, and fretful, and unreasonable. They howl for the moon. The more they are given in to, the more they demand and the more unrelenting their tyranny becomes. They smash things in sheer wantonness, and they need nothing on earth so much as to be turned across somebody’s knee and given a good spanking, and made to behave themselves.

All of us know plenty of men and women, with many fine and noble qualities, who would have made splendid husbands and wives if they had not been badly spoiled by their overindulgent wives and husbands. But instead of being disciplined, and forced to control themselves, and made to act like reasonable human beings, they had their weaknesses indulged, their selfishness encouraged, their exactions given in to, until they became a curse to themselves and to those who had the misfortune to be married to them.

Of course, when my correspondent speaks of a man being “good” to his wife, he means it in the sense of being indulgent to her. No man can be too good to his wife in the way of being kind, and tender, and sympathetic, and just, and fair to her. But he is not good to her—in fact, he does her a cruel wrong—when he is overly indulgent to her. He ruins her life no less than his own because the spoiled wife is never happy. She is always discontented, restless, dissatisfied, wanting something she hasn’t got and that is just beyond her reach. She thinks only of herself, and her pleasures, and the self-centered can always find flaws in their lot. The only contented wives are those who are doing their part toward making their marriage a success. The grafting wives are always whiny, and complaining, and disgruntled.

A man, for instance, is too good to his wife when he lets her lie down on her end of the matrimonial partnership. His part of the contract is to work and make the money to support a home. Her part is to make a comfortable home. There are many women who refuse to do this, and who force their husbands to live around in boarding houses and hotels. There are many more women who are so lazy and shiftless that they keep their houses as dirty as pigstys, and never give their husbands a meal that isn’t a first-aid to the undertaker. There are men who have to get up and get their own breakfasts before they start to business, while their good-for-nothing wives slumber and sleep. There are men who have to come home after a hard day’s work and help get the dinner, and wash the dishes, and bathe the baby, and sweep the floors, and do all the housework that their trifling wives have left undone.

Nothing but being a bedridden invalid excuses a woman for not doing her share of the work and for not feeding her family on properly cooked food, and any man is very silly who puts up with slack housekeeping from an able-bodied wife. She would get busy quickly enough with the broom and the cookbook if she knew she would lose her job unless she made her man comfortable.

A man is too good to his wife—or too bad to her—when he lets her ruin him with her extravagance. There are men of ability, men who are industrious, men who are filled with ambition and who were on the high road to success when they married. But they got spenders and wasters for wives, and thereafter their lives became just a frantic struggle to keep even with the bill collector. Strive as they would, they could never get ahead. They had to let every opportunity pass them because they never had a cent to put into any enterprise. Every dollar had gone to pay for the wife’s clothes, and entertaining, and trying to keep up with people better off than they.

The man who never says “No” to his wife’s ceaseless demands on his pocketbook may think that he is being good to her, but in reality he could do her no worse turn. For you can no more satisfy a greedy woman than you can a greedy child. Such women are the daughters of the Scriptural horse leech, forever crying: “More, more, more!” And in the end, when the crash comes, the extravagant wife is crushed under the ruin she has brought upon her household.

A man is too good to his wife when he makes all of the sacrifices and she monopolizes all of the privileges. There are households in which the husband has no rights or consideration whatever. He goes shabby, while wife is arrayed like Solomon in all his glory. He walks, while wife rides around in a limousine. He stays at home, while wife goes forth to summer and winter resorts. His tastes, his comfort, his pleasure are never considered. He cultivates selfishness in his wife by never demanding a square deal from her and by never making her give as well as take. And his reward is his wife’s contempt, for no woman respects a man upon whom she can wipe her feet.

Oh, yes, a man can easily be too good to his wife. The really good husbands are not those who make spoiled babies of their wives, but those who encourage their wives to develop into self-controlled, helpful, useful women.

X
THE ABSENCE CURE FOR FAMILY ILLS

One of the most pathetic things on earth is the unnecessary unhappiness we endure. The big, heartbreaking tragedies no one may escape. The loss of those we love. Frustrated hopes. Disappointments. Despair. These are the inevitable portion of humanity, and there is dignity in meeting them with courage.

But to have your life poisoned by the sting of a gnat; to be done to death by pin pricks, to be robbed of your happiness by petty aggravations, that is a different matter, and one rages alike against the futility of it, and the ignominy of it. And, curiously enough, we neither endure with fortitude these little, petty ills that spoil the peace of our days, nor do we try to seek a remedy for them.

Take family troubles, for example, which are responsible for more real, heartbreaking, never-ending misery than anything else in the world. A man and a woman drawn together by some fleeting physical attraction get married. When that is over, they find that they have not one thing on earth in common. Their tastes differ on everything from politics to pie. Their every idea and opinion is antagonistic. They do not think the same thoughts, or speak the same language. They may be people of the highest integrity, models of all the virtues. They may try to do their duty nobly and with self-sacrifice. But their home is a dark and bloody battleground where they fight over every topic like dogs over a bone, and they make life a hell on earth for each other.

Sometimes parents and children cannot get along together. Sometimes a nice, domestic old hen hatches out a swan. Sometimes a swan finds that nature has bestowed an ugly duckling upon her, and great is the clacking, and the clucking, and the feather-picking around the barnyard.

Often brothers and sisters cannot agree. They clash on every subject under the sun. They express their opinions of each other with the brutal candor of near relationship, and leave each other sullen and sore with resentment. They never sit down to a meal without being verbally armed to the teeth, and the maimed survivors feel as if they had been through the battle of the Marne. Sometimes there is just one particular member of a family who is a perpetual storm center, and who has but to blow in at the door to shatter the peace and harmony of the household.

Being obliged to live with disagreeable and antagonistic people is the greatest affliction that can possibly befall us. Nothing compensates for it. Not tho we dwell in a palace, with every meal a banquet, and have everything that money can buy us. Better it is to dwell on a housetop, or in a lodging house, and eat at a quick lunch place, and have peace, than abide in splendor with those who irritate the very soul out of us.

Nor are we consoled by the fact that the very people who are so impossible to live with love us well enough to die for us.

We know well enough that it is mother’s affection for us, and her anxiety about us, that makes her nag us incessantly, and hand out advice to us until we are ready to scream. In their philosophical moments men and women realize that even their in-laws knock them for their own good.

But it is the result, and not the theory, with which we are concerned, and as you listen to the wail of those who cry out against uncongenial marriages, and the moans of anguish of the in-laws who dwell under the same roof, and listen to the sounds of fratricidal strife, when everybody could be so happy if they didn’t have to live with each other, you wonder that so few people have the wisdom and the courage to apply the one sure cure for their misery. That is to separate. Apart they would be happy. They would even love each other. They would get a perspective on each other’s good qualities. But living together they merely get on each other’s nerves, and hate each other.

The old idea that blood is thicker than water, and that just because you happen to be born in a certain relationship to a group of individuals makes you automatically love them, and desire their society, hasn’t a word of truth in it. It is not even true in the relationship between parents and children.

As long as their children are young and helpless, most mothers have an animal fondness for them. But when they are older, it very often happens that a mother cannot get along in peace with her children. She does not understand them. She has nothing in common with them, and she is glad enough when they are grown and leave home.

No theory has been more mischievous than the old convention that people who were of the same family had to keep on living together, no matter how much they rubbed each other the wrong way, nor how unpleasant this enforced companionship was. There is no sense in doing it. No rhyme nor reason for it. Because Aunt Jane is Aunt Jane is no reason why you should take her into your home and be bored the balance of your life by her reminiscences, nor is there any reason why you should have your temper continually rasped by antagonistic sisters and brothers when there are plenty of agreeable strangers in the world.

Try the absence cure on your domestic troubles. Get up and leave an unpleasant home. You have no idea how much better you will love a lot of your relatives when you put about a thousand miles between you and them.

XI
THE DEADLY RIVAL

It would be interesting to know how many estranged husbands and wives began drifting apart with the advent of the first baby. Children are popularly supposed to be the tie that binds a man and woman indissolubly together in body and spirit in marriage. Often this is true, and in their love and hopes and ambitions for their children a husband and wife literally do become “two souls with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.” Also very often for the sake of their children men and women endure a marriage that they have come to loathe and hate, and are bound together like prisoners whose balls and chains clank at every movement they make.

Unhappily, children’s hands do not always draw husbands and wives closer together. They just as often push them apart, and when this happens it is oftener the woman’s fault than the man’s. Few men prefer their children above their wives, but for the great majority of women their husbands exist only as their children’s father and as purveyors to their children.

The first baby definitely and for all time puts the husband’s nose out of joint. Up to that time, husband has been king of the domestic realm. His wife has put on her prettiest clothes and adorned herself for him. She has been chum and playmate. She has exerted herself to amuse and entertain him. She has looked out for his comfort, has seen that he had the best of everything, and he has reveled in the bliss of having the center of the stage and the spotlight turned always upon him. Then arrives the baby, and from having been the worshiped head of the house, husband finds that he is nothing, with no one so poor as to do him reverence.

Wife no longer cares what sort of a figure she cuts in his eyes, or whether he admires her or not. She looks sloppy around the house because the baby pulls at her clothes and musses her chiffons. When husband wants to go out at night she refuses because she can’t leave the baby, and if he drags her along anyway, she interrupts the most thrilling part of a play to ask him if he thinks the nurse has forgotten to give the baby his bottle.

There are no more chatty evenings at home, because she is off worshiping before the baby’s shrine. She quits reading anything but baby books, and her conversation gets to be about as stimulating as sterilized milk. She is too busy with the baby to show her husband any of the little attentions that men so love, or to see even that he has the things he likes to eat.

There are thousands of homes which are run exclusively for the children. There is never any food on the table except just the simple things that children can eat. There is never any conversation except about the children. The wife never manifests the slightest interest in her husband, or shows him any affection. All of the tenderness, the caresses, the sympathy and understanding is lavished on the children. It is the children’s likes and dislikes and prejudices that are remembered and catered to.

There are many wives who begrudge every cent that a husband spends on himself because they want the money to throw away on the children. They will nag their husbands into giving up smoking so that they can buy the baby a real lace cap. There are wives who literally work their husbands to death that their daughters may go off to finishing schools, and their boys have the latest model sports automobile.

Now the average man loves his children, but he has not this crazy, obsessing passion for them that their mother has. When the first baby comes he is proud of it and fond of it, and he wants it to have every proper care and attention, but he doesn’t want to spend hours sitting by its crib, gloating over it and marveling at how naturally it breathes. He wants to go about the ordinary affairs of life as he did before the baby was born, and he wants his wife’s companionship.

But she will seldom go with him, and when she does, she is no fun because she doesn’t enter into the spirit of anything. She has left her whole interest in life behind in the nursery. Nor is she an entertaining companion at home any more. And it gets on his nerves being told to “sh-h-h-h-sh” every time he shuts the door, for fear he will wake the baby.

He even discovers that his wife is relieved when he goes out without her, and leaves her undisturbed to her infant adoration. And so the rift is first made between them. Each starts on a life in which the other has no part, and that takes them farther away from each other as the years go by.

If the true co-respondent were ever named in many a divorce case, it would be the first baby. There are always plenty of women a man can find who will play with him while his wife is busy in the nursery; who will listen to him and flatter him, while his wife is telling the baby he is the most boofulest thing in the world. While mama is holding the baby’s hand, some vamp is generally holding papa’s. It is a great thing to be a good mother, but it is equally as great a thing to be a good wife. And it is a bad thing to do either one at the expense of the other. Often children are better off for a little wholesome neglect, but a husband never is.

Remember that, ladies, and don’t make your baby your husband’s deadly rival.

XII
LEARN A TRADE, GIRLS

These few lines are addressed to the thousands of girls who have finished school and who are now standing, as the poet puts it, “where the brook and river meet” wondering “where do we go from here?”

I want to urge you, girls, with all the earnestness of which I am capable, to psychoanalyze yourselves and try to find out what talents and aptitudes nature bestowed upon you, and then to go to some school where you can develop your gift and fit yourself to be self-supporting.

I give this advice to the rich girl no less than to the poor girl, for in these days of shifting fortunes we have the new poor as well as the new rich, and no woman knows how soon she may be called upon to earn her own bread and butter or starve. If she has been taught how to do this, losing her money is merely an inconvenience to her; but if she does not know how to earn a dollar, it is a tragedy.

No women in the world are so pitiful as those who have, as the saying goes, “seen better days” and, with their money gone, are suddenly flung out into the world to make their own living, with no trade, no profession, no skill in any line, no knowledge of how to make a penny. They can only eke out an existence by doing the most ill-paid work, or else they become parasites, or are forced by hunger, and shabbiness, and need into the sad sisterhood of the streets.

Don’t risk such a fate befalling you. Prepare yourself in time against it. Have that within yourself which will not be affected by the fall in stocks or the depreciation of real estate. Many things may rob you of your fortune, but you cannot lose your trained brain and skilful hand. They will be a resource that you can always fall back upon in any emergency.

Of course I know, when I urge you girls to fit yourselves to learn some gainful occupation by which you can support yourselves, that you smile and say to yourselves that you do not expect to earn your own living long. You are going to marry and follow woman’s oldest profession, that of wife and mother. That is as may be. In the past the great majority of women have been able to count, with a fair degree of safety, on being able to marry, but it is by no means a foregone conclusion that the girl of to-day will get a husband.

There has been a most decided decline and falloff in matrimony and home life, and it is foolish for girls to think that they have the same chance of marrying that their mothers and grandmothers had. Now, for the girl who is sitting around and waiting for some man to come along and marry her, it is a catastrophe to be passed by. She becomes the sour and disgruntled old maid, eating the bitter bread of dependence, the fringe on some family that doesn’t want her. Or else she has to take any sort of a poor stick of a man as a prop to lean upon.

Far different is it with the girl who has fitted herself for some definite work and is competently doing it. She has a profession in which she is vitally interested. She has an occupation which fills her time. She makes enough money to indulge herself in the luxuries that women love, and so marriage becomes to her merely an incident of life, not the whole thing. If the right man comes along, well and good. If not, also well and good. She has her pleasant, independent, interesting life as a girl bachelor. The world to her is full of such a number of things besides wedding rings.

Furthermore, girls, even if you do marry, you may still need to keep on being a bread-winner instead of becoming a breadmaker. The high cost of living has to be reckoned with, and not every man under present economic conditions is able to support a family alone and unaided. In the past the good wife helped her husband by doing the housework, and turning, and mending, and pinching the pennies. In the future the good wife will doubtless help her husband by keeping on with her well-paid job and assisting in making the money to give her family the living conditions, and her children the education that the man alone could not afford to give them. So, except among the rich, marriage is going to mean a retirement from business no more for women than it is for men.

Another reason why I urge you, girls, to learn some gainful occupation and perfect yourself in it is because it will do more than any other one thing to make you happy. It will keep you from being bored, and boredom is at the root of all fretful discontent. People who are busy, who have a definite object in view and are striving to attain it, find the day all too short, are always content and cheerful. And talk about thrills! You never really know one until you hold your first pay envelope in your hand and it surges over you that the money in it represents your own work that was good enough for somebody to pay for.

Being able to make your own living sets you free. Economic independence is the only independence in the world. As long as you must look to another for your food and clothes you are a slave to that person. You must obey him. You must defer to him. You must bend your will to his.

But when you can stand on your own feet you can snap your fingers in the face of the world and tell it where it gets off. You do not have to endure tyrannical parents. You do not have to put up with a cruel husband. You can support yourself, and you are free.

So I urge you, girls, never to rest until you have fitted yourselves to earn your own bread, and butter, and cake. And remember, the better your work the more you earn. It is efficiency that pulls down the big pay envelope.

It doesn’t make a bit of difference what you do, my dear. It is the way you do it that counts. You can make a success or a failure of any occupation under the sun. The fat pay envelope is the reward of superexcellent work. It isn’t the perquisite of any particular trade or profession.

We do best those things that we enjoy doing, and so I urge you to sit down quietly and study yourself and try to find out what nature intended you to be.

Probably you have no very decided talent, no cosmic urge that makes you feel that you must paint, or sing, or dance, or cook, or keep books, or else life will be dust and ashes in your mouth.

But you are sure to find that there is something that you like to do better than other things. It may be trimming hats. It may be messing around the kitchen. It may be that you are quick at figures and can always remember dates. It may be that you write a good hand, or always got a hundred in spelling at school.

There is always some one thing for which you have a turn, as the phrase goes, and that points the road for you to follow.

If you have no mechanical skill, don’t do anything that requires deftness of the hands. If you can’t spell, don’t waste any time trying to be a stenographer. If you cannot add up a column of figures three times without getting four different results, pass up bookkeeping. You will never make a success of anything for which you have no aptitude. You will always hate it and be bored by it.

The successful people are those who love their work so well that it is a sheer joy to do it; who never count the labor that they put into it, and who are so interested in it that it is perpetually in their thoughts.

Therefore choose the thing that you like to do and get fun out of doing, and don’t just blunder into taking the first job that presents itself or make the mistake of taking up some profession to which you are not called because some other girls are doing so or because it seems to you romantic or elegant.

Of course, in these days of the emancipation of women, every road is as free for a girl to follow as it is to a boy, but you will find that those women make the greatest successes who stick to purely feminine lines. There is just as much need for woman’s work in the world as there is for man’s, and when it is equally well done it is equally well paid. In some occupations it is a little better paid because there are fewer women experts than there are men.

There are very few women who have risen from the ranks to become presidents of banks, or trust magnates, or big manufacturers; but every community has in it women who have made tidy fortunes as dressmakers, or milliners, or boarding-house keepers.

Teaching, nursing, cooking, sewing; home-making in all its ramifications and branches; buying and selling pretty things; the building and furnishing of houses; the healing of the sick, all of these are strictly within the feminine province, and you will not make a mistake if you choose whichever one of these occupations appeals to your fancy. Women have been unconsciously trained along these lines for centuries and have for them an inherited aptitude. It takes the average man years of profound study to acquire the sense of color that a girl baby is born with. And any dub of a woman can give an architect points on lights, and kitchen sinks, and the heights of shelves and about closets. So stick to your last and capitalize your feminine intuitions instead of trying to invade masculine fields. Even women writers and women artists are more successful when their work is most womanly. And great actresses will be remembered for the feminine rôles they portrayed, not for the masculine parts they essayed and in which they were grotesque failures.

Having selected your occupation, perfect yourself in it. Master its technique. Don’t be satisfied to be an also-ran. Make of yourself a blue-ribbon winner. You will have to work longer hours and harder doing ill-paid work than you will doing highly paid work. The difference between a $15 cook and a $10,000 chef is just a matter of skill. One woman gets $5 for a hat, another $50. It is just the touch to a bow or ribbon or a twist to a bit of velvet that does it. Whether you get a thin pay envelope or a thick one as a stenographer, or bookkeeper, or clerk, depends upon how expert you are. So make up your mind that you are not going to work for a pittance, and go after the big salary by making yourself worth it. Employers are just pining to pay the price of good work.

Then tackle your job as if you meant to make a life-work of it. Don’t look upon it as a bridge of sighs that you have to travel over with reluctant feet from the schoolroom to the altar. Think of it as something you are going to do as long as you live; something that is going to be your friend, and comforter, and stay, and to which you will give the best that is in you. That won’t keep you from marrying if the right man comes along, and it will be a powerful stay if no man comes. Not many girls do this. They regard their work as only a makeshift until they can marry, and so they never take the trouble to learn how to do it properly. That is why they fail, and why they are ill-paid. Don’t be one of them. Choose a congenial occupation and put your heart and your back into it, and your success will be assured.

XIII
TRIAL DIVORCE

I believe the one thing that would do more than anything else to stop the utter wrecking of homes and the half-orphaning of children, in the case of unhappy marriages, would be the institution of trial divorce and the refusal of the courts to make any divorce decree absolute under two years. For so many husbands and wives think they have ceased to love each other, when they are only too much fed up with each other’s society. So many persons think they long for freedom, when they only need a rest. So many persons think divorce a panacea for every ill, who find out, when they try it, that the remedy is worse than the disease.

The great majority of men and women are romantically in love when they get married, and they expect to live ever afterward in a state of storybook bliss. Then comes the inevitable disillusionment, when they find out that they have married ordinary human beings instead of angels and motion-picture heroes. Comes the clash of personalities. The fight of the selfish to get the best for one’s self. The rebellion at the sacrifices that matrimony demands.

The woman begins to nag. The man gets grouchy and surly. Each magnifies every fault of the other. Resentment and disappointment blot out every memory of love and tenderness, of goodness and nobility. They come to the point where they feel that they cannot stand each other a minute longer and rush off to the divorce courts.

But the ink is hardly dry on their decrees before they begin to view each other in a kindlier light. The man, living in his club or at a boarding house, wandering from restaurant to restaurant, hating the cooking and getting his digestion upset, begins to think of his ex-wife’s good points. How true and loyal and devoted she was! What a good cook and housekeeper! And he wonders that he didn’t have enough sense of humor to laugh at her nagging instead of letting it get on his nerves.

The woman, trying to make a home for herself with less money than she is accustomed to, bewildered and terrified at having to face life for herself, with no man to depend on, begins to recall her husband’s virtues instead of his faults, and to reflect that it is better to have even a husband who is short on compliments, and shy on attentions, and long on knocks, than to have no husband at all.

And in their secret souls both are conscience-stricken when they look at their children and see them lacking a mother’s or a father’s care and a real home. So there are thousands of couples who are merely disgruntled with each other who would come together again if a trial divorce gave them time in which the galled spots that the matrimonial yoke has made on their necks could heal and they could find out that they hadn’t got such bad teammates, after all.

The trial divorce would do much to solve even those cases in which husbands and wives think that they have fallen out of love with their lawful mates and have found their affinities in others. Nine times out of ten the reason that men and women lose their affection for their husbands and wives is just because they are bored with them. They have had an overdose of them. They have seen them too long and at too close range.

Every woman knows that when she starts off on her summer vacation she sees her husband as just a hump-shouldered, fat, bald-headed man, who is slouchy about dressing; but after she has been away a week she begins to remember what a classical nose he has. In a fortnight she thinks how handsome and distinguished-looking he is, and by the end of the month he is a perfect Valentino to her. The man has just the same reactions about his wife. She goes away fat and frumpy and middle-aged, and she returns merely plump and more attractive than any flapper to him.

Many men and women who think they are permanently tired of their husbands and wives are only temporarily weary of looking at the same face and listening to the same line of conversation across the breakfast table, and if a trial divorce gave them a second choice they would find that they preferred the old love to the new.

For the lure of the “other woman” and the “other man” is chiefly that they are unattainable and unknown, and these charms vanish before the trial divorce that makes them possible and familiar. It gives the foolish, infatuated husband and wife a chance really to compare the long-haired poet or the short-haired flapper with the partners they had and are about to lose.

Give a man time to forget his wife’s nagging, and his peaches-and-cream complexioned secretary will not look as good a risk, after all, to him as his faithful old wife. Give a woman time to forget the mean things her husband said to her when they quarreled, and she will think a long time before she exchanges her good provider for some impecunious glib love-maker.

The truth is, that few men and women find in divorce the solution of their woes that they expected. They picture it as a state of bliss in which they will be free of all woes and cares, an earthly paradise in which there will be no fretting wives or fault-finding husbands, and in which they will be able to do exactly as they please. But they find its golden apples Dead Sea fruit that turns to ashes on their lips. The man who has resented his wife’s tyranny and writhed under her curtain lectures, strangely finds out that he wants to go home, when he has no home to which to go, and nobody to care whether he ever comes back or not.

The woman who has thought she would be happy if she no longer had to live with a neglectful husband, finds that the world also neglects her and that her freedom has merely brought her the freedom of earning her own living. And when this hard and bitter knowledge soaks into the consciousness of men and women many of them would be glad enough to go back again to their old husbands and wives if they could.

So, when we unscramble our scrambled marriage laws, let’s put the trial divorce into them.

XIV
MARRY THE MAN YOU LOVE

A young woman wants to know whether it is better to marry the man she loves, or the man who loves her. Both, I should say. Marriage should be a mutual benefit association in which both parties give and receive; in which they love and are loved in equal measure. Cupid, however, is no dispenser of justice. He rarely holds the scales even. Very few husbands and wives feel the same amount of affection for each other. In almost every married couple one kisses and the other submits to being kissed, as the French proverb cynically puts it.

This being the case, it is better for the woman to be the kisser than the kissee, because, while it is misfortune to a woman never to be loved, it is a tragedy to her never to love.

Of course, every woman desires to be worshiped by some man, and she dreams of having a husband who will be a perpetual lover and spend his life laying tributes at her feet. She feels that she would be perfectly happy doing the goddess-on-a-pedestal act, and occasionally deigning to bestow a kind word on her adorer, as one throws a bone to a dog. Obsessed by this romantic vision, which flatters her vanity, many a woman is beguiled into marrying a man for whom she has only a mild liking because he is so crazy about her. She thinks that he can supply enough love for two, and that she will be happy and satisfied with just being loved.

It does not take her long to find out that she has made a sad mistake, and that there is nothing with which we can get so easily satiated as we can with the affection we do not return. We have no appetite for it and it is tasteless in our mouths. Nor are there any greater bores than those who love us, who cling to us, who want to be always with us, but whom we do not love and of whom we get tired to death.

All of us know doormat husbands whose wives ruthlessly trample them under foot. We all know peevish, disgruntled, discontented wives, whose husbands slave to give them luxuries for which they never get so much as—“Thank you.” We have all held up our hands in horror when some wife left a good, devoted husband and eloped with another man or packed her trunk and hiked out for Hollywood, and we wondered what was the matter with these women that they were not satisfied with their husband’s love.

The trouble with them was that they had married men who loved them instead of men they loved. If they had been doing the love-making and trying to hold the affections of husbands whom they suspected every flapper of trying to steal from them, they would have been too busy, too thrilled and interested to get into mischief.

There are many reasons why a woman who is contemplating matrimony should lay greater stress upon the state of her own affections than she does upon the man’s. The principal one, of course, is because a woman is ten times as much married to her husband as he is to her, and therefore it is ten times more important that she should be pleased with her bargain than it is that he should be satisfied with his.

A married man has a million interests, and distractions, and amusements, and compensations outside of his home, and if his wife does not turn out to be all that his fondest fancy painted her, he has his business to fall back upon, his ambition and his career to console him. He is never wholly dependent on his wife for his happiness. But a woman stakes her all on her matrimonial gamble, and if she does not love her husband, if she does not find happiness in her home, she has nothing.

A woman’s emotions make her life. What she feels is of more interest to her than what she does. She cannot substitute liking for loving any more than she can water for wine. And no matter how much she admires the man to whom she is married, no matter how grateful she is to him for his kindness to her, unless he can raise a thrill in her breast everything is cinders, ashes and dust to her.

She feels that she has missed the best thing in life, the thing she most wanted; and she is restless and dissatisfied, and is forever on a still hunt to find her real soul-mate.

To the average woman, marriage is a state of perpetual sacrifice. She must go through the agony of bearing children, and the long, weary years of ceaseless care and anxiety in rearing them. She must work harder than any hireling at the dull and monotonous task of cooking and cleaning and scrubbing and sewing and mending that it takes to make a comfortable home. And the only thing on earth that can make all of this worth while is love for her husband. That sets a star in her sky. That gilds the humblest task. The woman who stands over a stove cooking a dinner for the husband to whom she is utterly indifferent is a slave driven to her appointed task by her sense of duty. The woman who stands over a stove cooking dinner for a husband she adores is a priestess making a burnt offering of herself on the altar of her god.

The woman who marries the man she loves is never bored, and boredom is the particular curse of the feminine sex. She throws herself heart and soul into her husband’s interests, and is more eager for his success than he is himself. She is never dull, because the smallest thing that concerns him is of more import to her than the events that shake the great outer world. She can find food for thought and scope for her activities in the fact that her husband likes onions with his beefsteak or prefers mushrooms. Her days are filled with pleasurable excitement in preparing for his homecoming of an evening, and when she hears his key in the latch her heart strikes up “Hail to the King.”

The woman who marries the man she loves is never dissatisfied, never disgruntled. He may be a poor thing, but he is her own, the one she cut out of the bunch and which she marked with her own brand. Having got the one thing she wanted most, she can well afford to pity her poor sisters who have only limousines and pearls and the merely tolerated husbands who are the purveyors thereof. A woman should always marry a man with whom she is very much in love, because it insures her a stimulating and interesting life. The reason that most women run down and get slack and slouchy is because they are bored to tears with domesticity. They do not care for their husbands and so they take no trouble to please them.

But the woman who is in love with her husband, who married the man she wanted, is on her tiptoes all of the time. She means to keep him and she takes no chances on disillusioning him with curl papers, and cold cream, and bad cooking, and tantrums. She is eternally in pursuit; and while there may be times when she gets tired and feels as if she would like to sit down and take things easy, still there is no denying that the love chase puts pep in any lady’s day.

A woman should never marry any man except the one with whom she is very much in love, because every woman craves romance, and if she doesn’t get it at home she is very apt to seek it abroad, or else she goes through life hungry, unsatisfied. The wives who get into scandals; who think they find soul-mates in their preachers, or their doctors, or long-haired poets; the wives who run off after strange cults and who burden down the mails with letters to movie actors are all women who married men they didn’t love.

The women who are crazily in love with their husbands make their own angel’s food at home and don’t have to go around trying to pick up stray crumbs on the street. Of course, the woman who loves her husband better than he does her has her moments of acute jealousy, but even these are full of ginger and are better than the dull stagnation of having a man that you don’t take the trouble to lock up at night because you know you can’t lose him.

Truly, it is more blessed to give than to receive, and it is better for a woman to love than to be loved.

XV
ARE YOU GOOD COMPANY FOR YOURSELF?

Do you ever think what poor company most of us are for ourselves? It is strange but true that the one individual on God’s earth who bores the average man and woman more than any one else is just himself and herself. There is no society they so dread as their own, and no expedient so desperate that they will not resort to it rather than be left alone with themselves. They will fasten themselves like leeches on kinspeople and friends who try to shake them loose. They will stay on in homes where they know they are not welcome. They will put up with any discomfort in order to herd together. They will hold up the telephone poles at the corners of streets, and walk the aisles of the department stores until they are ready to drop with fatigue.

They will belong to clubs where they foregather with the dull and prosy and fat-witted, and where they spend hours listening to egotists monologue about how great and wonderful they are. Evening after evening they go to vaudeville performances whose every turn is so stupid it is enough to make even a hero scream with pain, and to see moving pictures whose scenarios are an insult to the intelligence of an idiot.

Anything—anywhere, to get away from themselves, to escape having to spend an hour in their own company. So universal is the belief that it is the limit of social and mental poverty to be reduced to your own society for company, that we speak of those who live alone as being lonesome, and pity them accordingly.

It does not even occur to us that they may have that within themselves which could make them gay and witty companions to themselves, of whom they would never tire.

It is easy, of course, to see why many people are bored to tears with their own company. Men and women who never read anything can’t have very much that is new and interesting to say to themselves. After they have discussed the state of the green grocery trade with themselves, on which they are rather fed up anyway after having wrestled with it all day, or mulled over the last gossip about the neighbors next door, and wondered for the millionth time how the Joneses can afford a new car, and where the Smith girl has been spending the evening when she came home at 3 A. M., they find that they have exhausted their conversational repertoire.

But if they are reading people they can never have a dull instant when they are alone, for every book, every magazine, every newspaper is a magic carpet that takes them in an instant into the uttermost parts of the world. There isn’t a strange sight they may not see, or a secret whispered behind a closed door they may not hear; nor a romance unfolded whose thrill does not touch their hearts and stir their pulse. Education and cultivation would be worth while if they did nothing else except take the curse off loneliness.

You can see how people who are envious and jealous and quarrelsome and mean-spirited dread to be left alone with themselves. They have devils from hell for company, those men and women whose souls are filled with bitterness and hate, and who are forever thrashing over old grievances, recalling old wrongs, bringing to life again old enmities.

We all avoid the pessimistic and the cynical—those who can see nothing cheerful or good in the world, and with whom even a chance meeting seems to take the warmth out of the sunshine, and God out of His heaven, and make all life dark and foul. How terrible, then, must it be to live with yourself when you have nothing to say to yourself that does not leave a dark-brown taste in your mouth? It is not strange that those who have lived hard and selfish and grasping lives are poor company for themselves.

You cannot imagine a widow spending a cheery evening recalling how she nagged her poor, dead husband, how cross and peevish and complaining she was, or how little she had done to repay him for all that he had done for her. Neither can you imagine a woman enjoying telling herself that if she had been less extravagant, and content with simple things, if she hadn’t demanded fine clothes and jewels and trips to Europe, that her husband would not have had to kill himself working, and that she might now have some one to talk to, living and breathing, instead of a demon of remorse.

It is not strange that a man wants other company than the recollection of how his coldness and neglect turned the bright, joyous, loving, tender girl he married into a quiet, sad woman who cringed like a whipped dog before his cruel fault-finding. Nor is it strange that the man who has driven hard bargains and overreached in trade, who has ground down the faces of those who worked for him, who has taken advantage of the ignorant and the trustful, and built his fortune on the ruins of widows and children, does not find his own society exhilarating.

When we are old we have nothing but our memories left us. They are enough company if they are filled with the smiling faces of those we loved, who recall to us kindly acts we have done, helping hands we have held out, and if they murmur to us of kindly, gracious deeds. But they are terrible companions if they are filled with memories of cruelty and wrong. Considering that, do what we may, we can never escape from ourselves, that we are bound to endure our own society, is it not a pity that we do not emulate the poet who said, “My mind to me a kingdom is,” and make ourselves better company for ourselves!

XVI
KEEPING YOUNG

None of us wants to die. No matter how strong our religious faith, nor how lustily we sing “Heaven is my home,” none of us is in a hurry to go there. We prefer to stay in a world in which we are acquainted and acclimated. Likewise, we all dread old age. It fills us with horror to think of becoming bent and tottering old men and women, our vigor of mind and body gone, sans hair, sans teeth, sans everything. So from time immemorial humanity has been on the still hunt for some magic that will stay the devastating hand of time and enable it to hold on to the youth it prizes so dearly. The ancients sailed the world over seeking fabled islands and miraculous fountains of perpetual youth. We moderns pin our faith to the surgeon’s knife and the druggist’s bottles, to monkey glands, and face liftings, and paints, and powders, and hair dyes.

All in vain. The black oxen of the years march over us, treading out our youth and beauty, our strength and high spirits, and nothing that we can do will stop them. So it seems a pity that we should waste so much thought, so much struggle, and effort, and energy, and money in essaying an impossible task. For do what we may, we cannot keep young, and when we try to camouflage age as juvenility the only people in the world that we fool are ourselves.

We can dye our hair the gold, or the black, or the jet of girlhood, but we cannot put under it the fresh face of sixteen. We can have our skin gored and tucked until all of our wrinkles are taken out, but there still remain the tired, old eyes that have seen fifty or sixty years. We can starve ourselves until we get the figures of flappers, but we are not lithe and graceful. We are living skeletons. We can roll our stockings and borrow our granddaughter’s clothes, but it doesn’t make us look like debutantes. It makes us look like those afflicted with senile dementia. The truth is, the more we fight age the harder it fights back and the sooner it conquers us. None grow old so quickly as those who work themselves into premature age trying to keep young.

Once I was standing behind a jaunty little figure perched on the runningboard of a car. She wore the gayest and sportiest of sport suits. She had the thin figure of a girl of fifteen. Her bobbed henna-colored hair curled under the brim of a rakish little hat. Presently she turned around and disclosed a face that was like a mask, it was so plastered over with cosmetics. “Heavens! Did you ever see such an old hag?” exclaimed a man near me.

Now, this woman was not more than fifty years old. She was in the prime of life, at an age when many women are handsomer than they ever were in their lives. No one would have thought of her as being old at all, if she had been willing to appear her own honest age; if she had had the pleasing plumpness that belonged to her time of life; if her soft, gray hair had waved about her face, and if she had been appropriately dressed. It was her effort to appear kiddish that called attention to what an old goat she was.

If bobbing and dyeing their hair, and dieting themselves to emaciation, and wearing knee-length skirts made elderly women look young and girlish, they would not only be justified in doing so, it would be a virtue to do it, for thereby they would make themselves easy on the eyes. But just the reverse is true. Their affectation of youth only calls attention to what a long distance they have traveled from youth. Old mutton never seems so old, and tough, and stringy as when it is dressed as spring lamb.

And the folly of trying to act young after you are old is just as great as that of trying to look sixteen when you are sixty. Women have been told so often they must keep their spirits young, they must never think old thoughts, they must never speak of age, or admit to themselves they are getting older, that they have come to believe that, simply by forgetting their birthdays, they can maintain perpetual girlhood.

We all know women who begin every reminiscence by saying that they were very young at the time it happened, and who give us to understand their husbands were cradle snatchers, who married them when they were mere infants. We know old women who are always teasing themselves about men, and talking about their best beaus, and pretending to have flirtations with boys young enough to be their grandsons, and repeating compliments about their eyes or their fascinations they allege men paid them, but that even an idiot would know that they made up themselves. How ridiculous the poor souls make themselves! How infinitely older they appear than the women who do not try to pose as vamps after they have ceased to look the part, and who regard men just as they do women, as interesting and agreeable human beings.

Perhaps, after all, we make too big a bugaboo of growing old. The twilight has its charms no less than the dawn or high noon, and so the last lap of the journey of life has its compensations and its joys if we are willing to accept them.

Anyway, the only way we can escape old age is by dying young. But if we welcome it as a friend, it deals kindlier with us than if we fight it as an enemy.

XVII
GOSSIP, THE POLICEMAN

A young woman writes me that she considers that she has a right to live her own life in her own way and do exactly as she pleases. So she has broken most of the Ten Commandments and snapped her fingers in the face of Mrs. Grundy. And now that she finds that her reputation is being torn to tatters, she thinks that she is being most unfairly treated.

“Oh, how I hate the whole tribe of kitty-cats!” she wails. “Oh, how hard, and cruel, and unjust people are!” Then she asks, “Don’t you think that gossip is the unpardonable sin?”

Not at all. Gossip is one of the most powerful influences in the world for good. It is the invisible, omnipresent policeman that enforces law and order. It is the scourge that keeps the trembling wretch in order and makes the weak-kneed and the wobbly walk the straight and narrow path.

We can stifle the voice of conscience, but we can’t silence the voice of our neighbors. We can dope ourselves into believing that we have a right to make our own code of conduct, but we can’t force the community in which we live to take our point of view on the matter, or to make any exceptions in our behalf to the standards that society has set up for good behavior. And it is this fear of what “they’ll say” that makes us curb our appetites and passions and keep up at least an outward show of decency. For no matter how vain and egotistic we are; no matter how self-complacent and self-satisfied we are; no matter how independent we think we are, we are all cowards who grovel in the dust before public opinion. It is the lifted eyebrow. It is the cold, measured, appraising look that weighs us in the balance and finds us wanting. It is the turn of a shoulder away from us and the little hush that falls on a group as we approach that tells us that we have been the subject of unfavorable discussion, which we dread more than we do the wrath of God.

It is the knowledge that she will be gossiped about if she indulges in any flirtations which keeps many a bored young married woman with romantic yearnings from indulging in little affairs with good-looking bachelors. She knows there might really be no harm in her having lunch with Mr. A. or going to the theater with Captain C., but that she could never explain it to the woman who lives across the street.

And the next time the Current Events Club meets she knows that she will be the current event of burning interest discussed. Therefore she turns down the alluring invitations and stays at home, and minds her p’s and her q’s and her babies.

And it is the fear of gossip that makes many an indiscreet girl watch her step and saves her from the stumble that would land her in the pit. She is easy-going and good-natured, and warm-hearted and affectionate, and she sees no harm in letting boys that she likes kiss her and fondle her, but it makes the flesh creep on her bones to think of the Amalgamated Scandal Mongers’ Union getting out their hammers and going for her if she does. She knows well enough that the neighbors on either side keep tab on what hour her beaux go home and what goes on as they sit on the front porch or stoop of an evening, and she conducts herself accordingly. There is no chaperon so efficient as Mrs. Grundy.

If we could only do as we pleased and get away with it without any censorious comments from our fellow creatures, there would be many more philandering husbands and wives than there are, many more girls wandering down the primrose path, many more neglected children and ill-kept houses, many more wife-beating husbands and virago wives. It is the knowledge that, if they give way to their natural impulses, they will be talked about, which gives many would-be sinners the strength to resist the temptation to be as bad as they would like to be.

The people who think it is so wicked to be talked about are only those who have something to hide, something that reflects on their character. It is our bad deeds we don’t want discussed. We are tickled to death to have our good ones broadcasted to the ends of the earth.

No man objects to having it told about that he is a model husband, a good provider and a tender father. The thing he wants hushed up is that he half starves his family in order to spend the money on a flapper. No woman wants to put the soft pedal on the conversation when her friends are telling what a wonderful wife and mother she is; but she doesn’t know how women, who call themselves her friends, can be catty enough to whisper behind their hands that she went out joy-riding with young Snookums and didn’t get home until 4 in the morning, while the baby was nearly dying with the croup.

Those who are down on gossip and feel that the world should cover up their shortcomings with a blanket of silence are unreasonable. Why should other people be more careful of your reputation than you are yourself? If you do not care enough for your good name to protect it, why demand that service of the general public? Foolish and vain expectation! For the gossipers keep on their good work, and the only way you can escape being talked about is to be so exemplary that you are a dull subject for conversation.

XVIII
THE LUCKY WORKING WOMAN

Why do we hold to the theory that work is a blessing to men, but a curse to women? We know beyond all questioning that the necessity of earning his bread by the sweat of his brow was the consolation prize that Adam was handed along with his eviction papers when he was turned out of Eden. We know that the only happy man is the busy man. We know that only in constructive labor does a man find an interest that never palls and a game in which there is a perpetual thrill. We know that work is the greatest anodyne for sorrow and the best protection against temptation. We know that, as Stevenson says, “if a man loves the labor of any trade apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him, and he is of all men most enviable.”

So manifold are the benefits men derive from work, so salutary are its effects upon them, that we have a contempt for the idle, purposeless man and feel that, no matter how much money he has, he has no right to spend his life in loafing. We are eager to get our boys to work, so that their restless young energy may find a legitimate outlet, instead of being employed in devising new forms of dissipation. The young man must have something to do, and if he isn’t bending his back in honest farming he will be breaking his neck in sowing a wild-oats crop.

Our attitude, however, toward women and work is diametrically opposite. We do not regard work as a good thing for women. On the contrary, we consider it a misfortune for a woman to have to work. We have even coined a phrase for it and speak of the woman who must earn her own living as a “poor working woman.” Worse still, the woman who works pities herself. The mother whose daughters go down to business every morning bewails their fate and feels that destiny has dealt most unkindly by them. The woman who must do her own housework, and look after her own babies, and make her own clothes sheds barrels of tears over her lot.

Men also accept this view of the situation that labor is a curse to women, and work themselves to death in order that their wives and daughters may live in parasitic ease, with servants to wait upon them and have nothing to do but kill time. In fact, the consensus of opinion seems to be that the ideal state for a woman is that in which she never performs any useful labor, but merely sits on a silk cushion and feeds upon strawberries, sugar and cream. All of this is a distorted view of the situation. Women need to work just as much as men do. Idleness has just as disastrous an effect upon the feminine character as it has upon the male, and among women, as among men, the only happy, contented ones are those who are so much engrossed in some useful labor that they haven’t leisure in which to consider whether they are satisfied or not.

Mother “poor Marys” and “poor Sallys” her daughters who have to earn their living, but nowhere else will you see healthier, happier girls than those holding down good jobs in stores and offices. Nine times out of ten the girl behind the counter is brighter, more alert, and finds life a far more entertaining proposition than does her purposeless idle sister before the counter.

Nor is the domestic woman who has to do her own housework entitled to shed any tears of self-pity on our necks. There is no more reason why a husky young woman shouldn’t do her share of the work of the domestic partnership than there is why her husband should not do his. It is no more of a hardship for her to have to work than it is for him, and many a rich old woman who sits now with empty hands that ache for occupation will tell you that her happiest days were the busy, crowded ones when she got up at five o’clock to cook her husband’s breakfast before he went to the factory and sat up until eleven o’clock washing and patching his clothes so that he could make a decent appearance next day.

It is a significant fact that the women who fill sanitariums and enrich nerve specialists are not the overworked, hard-driven wives and mothers. They are the middle-aged and elderly women, who have nothing to do but to canvass their systems for symptoms of every disease they read about in the magazines. It takes leisure to develop invalidism. Busy people keep well because they haven’t time to be sick.

Nearly every man’s ambition is to keep his wife in idleness, and he thinks that he is being a good husband when he can boast that she hasn’t a thing on earth to do but to amuse herself. It is pathetic that the thing that so many good husbands strive for is their undoing. For it is the idle women who are the peevish, fretful, discontented wives. It is the idle women who run off with all sorts of fool fads and fancies. It is the idle women who decide that their good, honest, hard-working husbands are not their real soul-mates, and who get into scandals with jazzhounds and elope with romantic-looking sheiks they have picked up in hotel lobbies.

The idle woman is never a happy woman. Having nothing to do but to think about herself, she is sure to prod around in her mind until she finds a grievance. Having nothing to do, she is sure to get into mischief. Having no interesting occupation, she begins to hunt for thrills. And the net result is that she works harder trying to amuse herself than she would at scrubbing floors, and the only reward is that life is flat, stale and unpalatable in her mouth.

Let us hope that the time will soon come when we will have enough intelligence to perceive that work is a woman’s salvation even as it is a man’s, and when we will congratulate the woman with a job instead of pitying her.

XIX
AN INDOOR SPORT

This is a sad world, mates, with too little sunshine in it, so far be it from me to abridge, abate or curtail any innocent pleasure. But it does seem to me that there are certain diversions that should be indulged in only in the privacy of home. One of these is the family spat. Apparently a large number of men and women get married for the sole purpose of providing themselves with a sparring partner, with whom they can put on the gloves at a moment’s notice with, or without, the slightest provocation. Life has no dull moments for them, because they are always saying something that draws blood, or framing a retort that will cut to the quick, and the excitement of a battle to the death is perpetually thrilling their nerves.

Without doubt, it is a merry and adventurous existence for the doughty domestic warriors who enjoy that kind of thing! I would not be cruel enough to deny them the cheery pastime of going to the mat over every trivial difference of opinion. But I do contend that conjugal quarrels are an indoor sport that should be pursued only when the participants have sought the seclusion that the cabin grants, as they used to say in “Pinafore,” and when all the shades have been pulled down and the keyholes stuffed with cotton.

Possibly the lack of an audience might take off a little of the edge of the bout for the battling husband and spouse; but, oh, how immeasurably it would add to the comfort and happiness of those of us who are the innocent bystanders and who are forced to look on, sick with horror, at these encounters! In all good truth I know of no other situation so miserable and so embarrassing as to be called upon to referee a fight between a married couple. Their quarrel is, to begin with, a matter with which we have no concern; one in which we do not desire to meddle; one in which we ardently wish to take neither side. It makes us feel as if we were cowards to keep silent while a man hurls deadly insults at his wife, and we writhe in vicarious shame while a woman vituperates her husband.

We have the sense of having assisted in an indecent orgy when a husband and wife strip every rag of reserve away from their relationship and fling open the doors of their skeleton closets, and rattle their bones in public. Nor are we consoled by the knowledge that the people who make public exhibitions of their tempers must enjoy doing so or else they would not do it. Yet we all number among our friends, husbands and wives, otherwise estimable and charming individuals, who always stage their fights in the most conspicuous place they can find, and who seem to prefer an audience to privacy. When you meet them for an evening’s diversion they are having a preliminary set-to. Perhaps the husband has come home late from the office, or has forgotten to mail a letter, or possibly the wife has kept her husband waiting while she did her hair over the second time. During the selection of the dinner they get warmed up to the work and put in some punches with real steam behind them. They clinch, and bite, and gouge over the selection of a play, and they reach for each other’s vital spots and get in dirty jabs at the supper dance that follows the play.

Doubtless the fighters are enjoying themselves, but a pleasant time is not being had by all. The abashed onlookers know not what to do. They do not know whether to rush in and make it a free-for-all fight or to try to mediate between the warring couple, or whether to pretend to have been suddenly stricken deaf, dumb and blind. And they wind up by feeling outraged that they should have been placed in such a mortifying position, and wishing heartily that husbands and wives would keep their quarrels for home consumption, and not inflict them on their friends.

The same strictures apply to the woman who henpecks her husband. That also is one of the quiet home joys that should be strictly confined to the domestic circle. I raise no voice of protest against the woman who has wit and strength and determination enough to oust her husband out of his position as head of the house and assume it herself. It is a matter between the husband and wife, and if he hasn’t enough spunk to fight for his rights he deserves to lose them. But why cannot the bossy women be content with exercising their tyranny quietly and unobtrusively? Why do they insist upon rattling the chains by which they lead their husbands until they call public attention to them?

Think of the women you know who always say “MY house.” “MY car.” “MY children.” Who always walk ahead of their husbands and point out a seat, and say, “John, sit there,” and who always tell John where to get on and where to get off! And think how all the rest of us are embarrassed for poor John! Believe me, dirty linen should be washed at home, and family quarrels staged there. That is one of the main things for which homes are designed.

XX
SHOULD WOMEN TELL?

I get a great many letters from women who write that there is a dark stain on their past life. In the headstrong folly of youth they took a step down the primrose path, then repented of their sin, and turned their back 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 wrong-doing. Sometimes a woman who had mired her skirts to the knees has washed them clean with her tears of remorse, 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 tell these men the story of their life before they marry them, or bury the secret in their heart, and leave the matter on the knees of the gods?

This is a problem 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 skeleton closet and exhibiting its contents 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 down good and hard on her secret.

The question of right does not enter into the matter unless you institute a prematrimonial confessional in which men shall bare their souls as well as women. There is no more real reason why a woman should tell a man every detail of her past than there is why he should tell her of 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 foundation of honest understanding, but nobody can claim that it would make for their felicity, or increase their affection 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 ghost out of the past, that they could not banish, and that would forever stand between them.

Men have had the wisdom to perceive this. They realize that what a 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 a wife with a working diagram of their past lives with which she can torture herself, and them. They draw a discreet veil over episodes that are best forgotten, anyway, and deal only in glittering generalities 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 into her memory.

It is only when the case is reversed, and when it is the woman who has a blot upon her past, that she wonders if it 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 makes one standard for the woman and another for the man, and that, humorously enough, makes a husband feel that he has been exceedingly 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 may find out about her past life, or 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 revelations.

But, while he forgives, he never forgets. Always he is haunted by the memories of what she has revealed. 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 a whip of scorpions to scourge her with when he is angry with her.

Of course, when either a man’s or a woman’s past life has in it some sinister curse that reaches out and lays a hand on the future of the one he or she marries, he or she is bound in honor to tell the other one about it. But when there is nothing of this kind, nothing but a youthful folly, a mistake, a blunder in the dark, bitterly repented of and lived down, it seems to me the part of wisdom for both men and women to forego post-mortems, and to wash the slate clean and make a fresh start.

What they have done does not matter so much as what they are going to do. And it often happens that just because a man or woman has stumbled in the past they walk the more carefully among the pitfalls of life, and that out of the sorrows and repentance for their sins they have brought a tenderness, a compassion, a forbearance and an understanding that makes them better men and women than the vast majority of those who have lived blameless lives.

Confession is always weakness. The brave soul keeps its own secrets, and takes its own punishment in silence. It takes a strong man or woman to keep from blabbing, but it pays never to tell anything that you do not wish the world to know.

XXI
DOMESTIC BOREDOM

The thing that oftenest makes marriage a failure is its dulness. The real specter on the hearth is that awful silence. It is because husbands and wives have nothing interesting to say to each other that they quarrel. It is no joke, it is a sad truth, that in any theater or restaurant you can spot the married couples at a first glance. They are the couples who are sitting up reading the program through from cover to cover between the acts, or are apparently memorizing the menu while the waiter brings their order. The alert, interesting, smiling people who are gayly chatting together are the unwed, or those who are talking to other people’s husbands and wives.

Let even a bore drop into a droopy, dejected family circle that has been yawning itself to death and everybody brightens up and the stream of conversation which had apparently dried up at its source begins to flow again. Two may be company and three a crowd before marriage, but generally after marriage two is gobs of silence and three a godsend.

Yet the majority of people marry for companionship. Before marriage they could never get enough of each other’s society, and they esteemed each other perfect spellbinders. How is it, then, that they get so fed up on each other’s company that they sit up like mutes in the solitude of their homes? Why is it that, apart from fault-finding and spats and complaints about the servants and the tradesmen and bulletins about the children, there is so little family conversation; practically none that is interesting and cheerful and inspiring? You would think that a husband and wife who have all interests in common could never talk themselves out. But they do, and they come to the place where they take refuge behind the evening paper or in solitaire to save themselves from the pretense of even having to maintain the appearance of keeping up social intercourse.

Wives lay the blame for this state of affairs on their husbands. They say, heaven knows, that they would be glad enough to talk, but that you can’t maintain a conversation with a person who always grunts by way of reply, and who could give a clam on ice points on silence and then beat it at the game. Men retort that they have exhausted their conversational powers during business hours, and they desire to rest their vocal cords at home. Nevertheless, it is observable that if somebody interesting happens to call, or they go out to dinner, the very man who was silent at home finds plenty to say.

Now there are several reasons why there is so little conversation in the home. The first reason is because home talk is so often unpleasant. Women, especially, are prone to flavor it with gloom. They like to recite the litany of the day’s mischances. They spoil the flavor of a dinner by telling how much it cost. They bring on a scene with a child by telling of its naughtiness. They thrash over their old grievances because they can’t have what richer women have.

All of this gets on the husband’s nerves, and he retorts by saying a few pithy things about what a fool a man is to marry and burden himself with a family and what a poor manager his wife is, and he gives a few knocks to the dinner for good measure. After which conversation naturally languishes.

Another reason that there is little conversation at home is because it is dangerous. Experience teaches us that we have to watch our tongues and delete our home talk if we want to save ourselves from endless trouble.

A man hates to lie to his wife about what he does. He would enjoy telling her all about the poker game he stayed downtown for last night, and the funny things the boys said and did, but he does not do it because well he knows that the price of such an indiscreet revelation would be to have her nagging him about it forever and a day. A wife would just love to tell her husband about her adventures in buying a new hat, and how she fell for the twenty-five-dollar one instead of the fifteen-dollar one she meant to buy. But she is well aware that she would never hear the last of her extravagance if she did. So they both keep silent.

There is little home conversation because nobody is interested, and nobody pretends to be, in what you say. In the family circle nobody listens. Nobody laughs at your jokes. Nobody sees the points of your merry cracks. Try to tell a good story, and somebody is sure to remark that they have heard it before, and that it is an ancient wheeze. If you had discovered the North Pole and were relating your hairbreadth adventures in reaching it by airplane, somebody would interrupt at the most breathless moment to say that the iceman forgot to deliver the ice yesterday.

Wives won’t listen even when their husbands try to tell them about their hopes and plans and ambitions in their careers. And when a woman tries to talk to her husband about the things that are of vital interest to her he falls asleep and snores in her face.

And that is why conversation is a lost art in the family circle.

XXII
TO MARRY OR NOT TO MARRY?

A young woman once said to me:

“I am, as you know, the private secretary of the head of a very big business concern. I get a generous salary. My hours are easy. My employer, who is an elderly man, is one of the finest men in the world, and treats me with every courtesy, kindness and consideration. I feel it a privilege to be in daily contact with such a brilliant mind as he has. I love my work. I have what they call in men a business head. To me there is no other romance so fascinating as the romance of commerce; no game so absorbing as the business game. And it thrills me to the finger tips to know that I have a part, even if it is a small one, in this great adventure that sends men and ships to the uttermost parts of the earth and that gambles for fortunes.

“It gratifies my vanity to know that I have worked up from the bottom to my present fine position, and it pleases my ambition to know that I can climb still higher, and that every year I will be more efficient and more valuable to my employer. I enjoy the money I make, and the luxuries it brings me, as only a woman can who comes of a poor family, and whose girlhood has been barren of all the pretty things that girls crave. I find a lot of solid satisfaction in watching my bank account grow, knowing that, if I keep on with my job for a few years, I will have put by enough to safeguard my old age.

“So far, so good. If I were going to remain perpetually on the sunny side of forty, I would ask no life better than that of the successful business woman. But the dread hour will strike for me, as it does for all other women, and I am wondering if, when it does, I will not find myself a lonely old woman, and wish that I had married and had children.

“I am thirty now, and I have got to decide the question in the next year or two. Shall I give up my mahogany desk for a gas range? Shall I forfeit my fat pay envelope for a job where I shall have to toil ten times as hard for only my board and clothes? Shall I give up the occupation for which I spent years in preparing myself, for which I have talent and which is a joy for me to perform, for domestic service which I loathe, for which I have no aptitude and in which I am utterly unskilled?

“When I see my sister shabby, bedraggled, overworked, with her crying babies and grouchy husband I feel like clinging to my good, soft, easy office position with both hands. Then rises that specter of the future in my pathway, and I wonder if in staying single I will miss the best that life has to give to a woman, and if I will regret it if I refuse to follow the traditional career of my sex.

“Of course, I know that there are women who try to have their cake, and eat it, too; who grab matrimony with one hand, and hold on to their jobs with the other, but my observation is that they always fall between the stools. They are failures both as business women and as wives and mothers, for to succeed in anything you have to give everything that is in you to it.

“No woman is of much use in an office when nine-tenths of her brain and all of her interest are back home in a cradle and she is worrying over whether a hired nurse is giving the baby its milk. Nor can any woman who comes back home at night, with a worn-out body and jangled nerves, be anybody’s ideal of a wife and mother.

“So as far as I am concerned I have to decide the question which I am going to be, a business woman or a domestic woman, before I take the fatal step, and for the life of me I can’t make up my mind which to do. To marry or not to marry, that is the problem that I am acquiring gray hairs and wrinkles debating.

“Of course, if a fairy prince should come along and say, ‘Come and be my queen, and ride beside me in my limousine and tour the world with me on my yacht,’ I should doff my Cinderella working suit and put on my glass slippers, and step out with him.

“But it is only in novels that millionaires espouse poor working girls. The men who come a-courting me are just ordinary young chaps on small salaries, whose wives will have to do their own cooking, and wear hand-me-downs.

“Nor would there be any difficulty in settling the question if I had an overwhelming passion for some man. Then I would cry, ‘All for love and my job well lost!’ and a two-by-four flat would look better to me than to be president of the greatest corporation in the world. But I am not really in love. I have merely an affection for a certain chap that I might possibly cultivate into a warmer emotion if I decided that it was better, after all, to marry.

“But it is cruel, isn’t it, that a woman has to choose between marriage and her career? When a man marries he merely annexes a home and wife and children to the pleasures and interests of his work, but a woman has to sacrifice one or the other. And I don’t know which one to choose.”

“And whichever way you decide, you will be apt to regret it,” I replied consolingly.

XXIII
WOMAN’S GREATEST GIFT

A man told me the other day that he had not married until he was forty-five years old because he was determined not to marry any woman who did not have a sense of humor, and it took him that long to find one.

A wise man! A very Solomon among men! May his tribe increase! It is a million times more important for a woman to have a well-developed funny bone than it is for her to have a Grecian profile, yet when men go to marry they pick out a girl for a wife because she has melting black eyes, or soulful blue eyes, without ever once observing whether the said eyes look on the funny side of life or take a dark, pessimistic, bilious view of it. Which is one of the reasons that domestic life is no merry jest to the average husband.

A sense of humor is desirable in a man, but it is absolutely essential for a woman to have a sense of humor if she is to be an agreeable life partner, because a woman’s existence is made up of little, nagging things, at which she must either laugh or cry, and if she can’t laugh them off, they get on her nerves, and she goes to pieces.

It is the neurotic, haggard women, who can’t see a joke even after it is diagrammed for them, who fill the insane asylums and the sanitariums and divorce courts. The women who wear the smile that won’t come off, and whose laughter is set on a hair trigger, get to be fair, fat and forty, and you couldn’t pry their husbands away from them with a crowbar. It is the lack of a sense of humor that causes women to make tragedies instead of comedies out of trifles.

Take the servant trouble, for instance. Women worry themselves sick over the mistakes of a green maid, and it never occurs to them that the very blunders that they are shedding tears over are screamingly funny contretemps that they pay out money to see imitated in a sketch on the vaudeville stage.

Of course, no one wants the soup to be seasoned with sugar instead of salt, nor the waste-paper basket to be put on the mantel as a parlor ornament as a perpetual thing, but the mistress who can get a laugh instead of a sick headache out of the mistakes of her Norah or Dinah, fresh from Ireland or the cotton fields, saves her own face and that of the maid whom she later trains into being a good servant.

Moreover, a woman with a sense of humor can take the curse off of even bad cooking, for there is not one of us who would not rather sit down to a boiled dinner with a jolly woman, full of good stories and anecdotes, than to attend a banquet where the hostess is gloomy and peevish and whiny, and who frets with her children and spats with her husband.

Whether a woman makes a success or failure of matrimony depends altogether on whether she has a sense of humor or not. If she can see her husband as one of the most mirth-provoking, side-splitting, uproarious human jokes that nature ever perpetrated she will be happy, and he will bless heaven on his knees for having given him the paragon of wives. But if she sees him as an Awful Problem, or a subject for reformation, neither one of them will ever know a happy hour, and the marriage will either end in a divorce court or a long endurance contest.

The women who wreck marriages are the ones who take their husbands seriously, and who get tragic every time their husbands look at another woman, or play a little poker, or fail to come home at the appointed hour, and who weep when their husbands forget an anniversary, or fail in some little attention they consider their due. The women who keep their husbands enslaved from the altar to the grave are the women who laugh with their husband over their little faults and peculiarities. They make a joke of their husband’s weakness for a pretty face; they have a dozen funny stories to tell about how they helped their husbands out of scrapes, and, instead of feeling ill-used and assuming the pose of a domestic martyr when their husbands forget their birthdays, they go out and buy themselves a particularly nice present, which they pay for without a murmur because they know that a wife with a sense of humor is worth anything she costs.

A sense of humor is even more necessary to a mother than it is to a wife. The humorless woman takes her children too tragically. They wear her out, and she alienates them from her by her ceaseless nagging because she thinks that every little foolish thing they do is full of direful significance. The mother with a sense of humor knows that youth is as subject to certain follies as it is to the mumps and the measles and the whooping cough, and that it must go through these experiences, as it did through the cycle of infantile diseases, but that they are not fatal if they are carefully watched.

She may not approve of all the manifestations of flapperism and jellybeanitis, but she knows that the remedy for them is laughter and not tears, and so she keeps her young ones in bounds with good-natured ridicule. Nor does she break her heart with dismal forebodings about the terrible fate that is bound to overtake boys and girls who do not dress and act as did their grandparents. She has seen too many silly young people develop into fine men and women to borrow trouble worrying over what is going to become of the race.

In its last analysis, a sense of humor is just the sense of proportion that enables us to see things in their true relation to life. It is the thing that keeps us from making mountains out of molehills, and that gives us the courage to smile instead of cry. Happy the woman who has this gift, and thrice happy the man who gets her for a wife.

XXIV
GRAFTING ON THE OLD FOLKS

It is a curious thing, in a way it is a beautiful thing, and it’s a selfish thing, that children rarely ever think of their parents as human beings. Children think of their fathers and mothers as the source whence all blessings flow or they think of them as an avenging justice. But it seldom occurs to them that their parents are men and women, in addition to being parents; that they have the same preferences and long for the same pleasures as other people, and that they have a few rights that even their children should respect.

Of course, a small child unquestionably takes for granted all that its parents give and do for it. It is merely the order of nature that Mother should appear at its bed with the cup of water for which it cries out in the night; that Mother should clean up the dirt it brings into the house and spend hours over the stove cooking the things it likes to eat; and that Father should work while it plays and go shabby to give it fine clothes.

As they grow up, children continue to demand more and more of their parents. They bleed Father and Mother white for the things they want. They are not intentionally cruel, but they will take the last dollar they can wring out of the family purse without ever once thinking that Father and Mother might like to spend some of the money they earn on themselves and in gratifying their own desires. And, curiously enough, even after they have grown to man’s and woman’s estate, the great majority of people still hold to this point of view about their parents. In regulating their lives, they do not take their parents’ rights into consideration. They do not say, “My father and mother have sacrificed enough for me; they have done enough for me. Now I will stand on my own feet, and be as little a burden as possible to them.”

Of course, the most flagrant illustration of this is found in the loafer sons and daughters who let their old parents work and support them. We all know husky, able-bodied young men who play golf while Father slaves in an office, and strapping big girls who perform on the piano while Mother is performing on the gas range. Apparently, it never crosses the mind of these despicable young people that after they are old enough to support themselves they have no right to sponge upon their parents, and graft their living off them. Still less do they ever think that Mother and Father would like to take things easier as they grow older, and indulge in a few of the luxuries they have had to deny themselves while they were raising and educating their children.

Another illustration of how little children regard the rights of their parents you may see in the nonchalance with which young mothers turn over their children to their own mothers. When Sally wants to go to a bridge luncheon or Maud wants to take a trip, they dump the children down on Mother. When Clarabell wants to go to Europe for the summer, she doesn’t worry at all as to what to do with the children. She leaves them, with a thousand instructions as to diet and clothes, and manners and morals, with Mother. So that in innumerable families Mother becomes nothing but a sort of universal nursemaid.

It would shock these daughters to be told what a mean, selfish thing they do in not standing by and doing their own baby tending as Mother did hers. They, themselves, know what it is to walk the colic—what broken nights mean, how incessant must be the care given little children—how nerve-racking children’s noise is. Yet they foist this burden on Mother without a pang of compunction because they are so used to seeing her doing everything for them.

It never occurs to them that she would like to fold her hands in a little peace and rest; furthermore, that she has earned it by bringing up one family, and her daughters haven’t any right to make her substitute on raising another one.

Then there are the children who lay their matrimonial burdens on their parents. John gets married before he is earning enough to support a family. Susie marries a ne’er-do-well, in spite of all efforts to prevent it. Fanny discovers that the man to whom she is married is not her soul mate, and gets a divorce, and comes back home with two or three children. None of these selfish young people, bent on gratifying their own desires, considers Father’s and Mother’s rights in the matter, yet the parents, in the end, are the real sacrifices.

They can’t let John and his wife and children starve, and so the money that Father and Mother had saved up for their old age goes in pittances to help him along. They can’t shut the door in Fanny’s face when she comes back with her divorce and her half-orphaned children, so Father works harder, and Mother pinches and economizes more to raise and educate this second family that their children have thrown upon them. Surely there is no other thing that children need to realize so much as that their parents have some rights. Perhaps if they understood this, and that after a man and a woman have raised a family of children they have a right to peace and quiet and their own money, there would be fewer parasitic sons and daughters.

Perhaps, if they realized that parents had rights, more young people would consider how their marriages would react on their parents, and many a disgruntled wife would carry on with a marriage that wasn’t perfectly congenial rather than burden her old parents with her own and her children’s support.

XXV
ARE YOU A GOOD FATHER?

Are you a good father to your daughter, Mr. Man? You smile derisively at my question. A good father to your little girl? You’ll tell the world you are! Why, she is just the very core of your heart, and there hasn’t been a blessed thing that she has wanted since the day she was born that you haven’t given her. Why, you have almost broken your neck trying to get the moon for her when she cried for it. Pretty dresses, fashionable schools, good times, her own car, far more luxuries than you could afford her, you have lavished upon her without stint. You have kept her wrapped in cotton wool, and she has never known there was such a thing as work or responsibility or self-denial in the world. You may have failed in many other directions in doing your full duty, but you can pat yourself on the back and thank God that you have been a good father!

Well, let me tell you that if all you have done for your daughter is just to pamper her and spoil her and make her weak and selfish and self-centered, you have not been a good father. You have been the worst sort of father. You have never looked upon your daughter as anything but a pretty doll to dress up and play with, and dolls cannot take care of themselves in the rough-and-tumble fight of life. Sooner or later they are apt to get broken.

Let me tell you what I consider a good father. A good father is a man who doesn’t look upon his daughter as a toy or a piece of bric-a-brac, but as a human being who has been born with the heavy handicap of the feminine sex upon her. That means that she will always be less strong than a boy, less capable of taking care of herself, in far more danger. Fewer opportunities will be open to her, and many more perils beset her than would a boy. Therefore, she needs more protection. She needs to be better trained to deal with the world. So the good father sees to it that his girl gets the very best education that she will take. Not the flubdub, fluffy ruffles sort, but a solid, practical education that develops whatever gray matter she has got in her pretty little head, that teaches her to think and reason and that gives her a solid foundation on which to rear her house of life.

Then the good father has his daughter taught some profession or trade whereby she can earn a living, and he has her follow this occupation for at least a year. He does this for many reasons. He does it because he knows how easily money is lost, and he wants to know that his daughter has in herself the skill and ability to make her own living if she is ever thrown on her own resources. He does it because he knows the knowledge that she can stand on her own feet and earn her own bread and butter and cake, gives a girl a poise nothing else in the world can give. He does it because the discipline of a business office, the experience in handling money and an insight into the troubles and problems of men are the best preparation any girl can have for matrimony.

A good father chums with his daughter. He begins being confidential with her in her cradle, and this makes it natural that when she grows up she should discuss with him the boys who come to see her, and that father should be able to form her tastes and assiduously guide her in her choice of a husband. Girls know nothing about men. It is impossible that they should, but there is nothing about any young chap that father can’t find out, and if he knew that this youth had a hectic past, or that one drank, or the other one was a trifling ne’er-do-well, it would be the simplest thing possible to prevent many an unhappy marriage by making daughter see a suitor through the sophisticated eyes of a worldly-wise man, instead of the romantic ones of a young girl.

A good father tries to protect his daughter after he is dead. So, when he makes his will he leaves her whatever money he has to bequeath her tied up good and tight in a trust company so that she cannot touch anything but the interest. He knows that every woman who has any money is the foredoomed prey of get-rich-quick sharks and all of her parasitic relatives. He has seen too many women sell their gilt-edge bonds and invest the proceeds in wildcat stock that promised to pay 40 per cent and never paid a penny. He has seen too many women lend their money without security to Deacon Jones, because he prayed so beautifully, or to Uncle John, because they didn’t have the nerve to say “No” to a member of the family.

Above all, a good father leaves his daughter’s money in trust for her, not only to save her money but to save her from friction with her husband. He has seen many a man graft his wife’s fortune deliberately, and he has seen many more good men, who were poor business men, bring their wives to poverty. And he knows that it takes more backbone than the average woman possesses to hold on to her money when the man she loves is continually asking her for it. So father saves her the necessity of any arguments on the subject. Are you doing these things for your daughter, Mr. Man? Are you a good father?

XXVI
THE MORAL MUSCLES OF YOUR CHILDREN

The most overdressed and overindulged children are those whose parents were poor in their youth. The most undisciplined and uncontrolled children are those whose parents were reared in strict and stern households. When you see a little girl playing around in a befrilled lace and embroidered dress and silk stockings, you do not need to be told that at her age her mother wore gingham and went barefooted. When you see a young boy splitting the road open in an imported car you know that when his father was a lad he trudged on foot to the factory with his dinner pail on his arm. When you see ill-mannered young people who smoke and drink and carouse and recognize no law but their own pleasure; who run roughshod over the rights of others; who have no respect for age, and who either patronize their parents or treat them with contempt, you know that they are the offspring of fathers and mothers who were given few privileges when they were young and who were coerced by determined and strong-handed parents into walking the straight and narrow path.

Nothing is more common than to hear people say, “I don’t want my children to be denied things as I was in my childhood”; “I don’t want my children to have to work as I did when I was a child”; “I don’t want my children to be suppressed and tyrannized over as I was when I was young.”

Indeed, so common is this feeling that sometimes it seems that the present generation is being brought up by the rule of contraries, and that the only fixed idea that many parents have is to rear their sons and daughters exactly opposite from the way they were reared; to give them everything they didn’t have and to let them do everything they were not permitted to do.

There is something very pathetic in this. It speaks so eloquently of the ungratified cravings of childhood, of the weariness of little hands that never knew any playtime; of the thwarted desires for pleasure at the time of life when one is mad for amusement, and it is easy to understand why parents whose own childhood was stinted and dull should want to lap their children in luxury and give them all the fun they missed. But in trying to save their children the hardships they have gone through, they are also cutting their sons and daughters off from the experiences that make such men and women as they are themselves—the kind of men and women who rise from poverty to fortune and from obscurity to fame. For it is not in the lap of ease that successes are made. It takes struggle and self-denial and discipline to form character.

That is why we have the proverb that it is three generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves. The poor man by energy and industry piles up a fortune, but because he has had to work and save in his youth he teaches his children to be idlers and wasters and spenders, and they run through their fortune and their children must go to work again at the bottom of the wheel. Probably the children of the self-made man have naturally just as much ability as he has, but they nearly always amount to nothing, because their foolish father has denied them all the advantages he had when he was young and he has enervated them with indulgences.

People who have been brought up in puritanic homes almost invariably let their children run wild. They put no restraints upon them. They demand nothing of them. They resent the lack of liberty they had in their youth, and so they give their children license. They do not seem to realize that the system at which they rail made good citizens, instead of the hoodlums which they are turning out. They do not reflect that they owe their health and strength to clean living; that because they were made to do things they formed habits of industry; that because they were made to do hard things just because it was a duty to do them they developed the grit which keeps men and women from being quitters; that because they were taught obedience and self-control they became captains of their own souls and masters of their fate, instead of being the playthings of their passions and emotions.

They must know, if they stop to think at all, how much better fitted they were to meet life, how much more secure they were of happiness than are their children, who have never been taught to do anything they do not want to do, or to deny themselves the gratification of any appetite or desire.

For life doesn’t change. The world does not alter and no matter how much we would like to soft-pad existence for our children and stand between them and every hardship and sorrow, we cannot do it. At the last, in one way or another, they must come to grips with fate, and when they do the weak and dissolute will perish. The spendthrifts will come to want. The self-seekers will have their hearts broken.

Of course, it is a great temptation for parents to lavish upon their children everything that money will buy, and it is much easier to give strong-willed youngsters their heads and let them go their own gait than it is to hold them in check, but that way destruction lies for the child. And this is something that parents, who are denying their children the struggle of life that made them what they are, might well reflect upon.

XXVII
THE MOTHER-IN-LAW

Undoubtedly there is no other thing over which so many tears are shed and which is such a potent source of discord and misery as in-laws. Innumerable young women have the happiness of their youth wrecked by their quarrels with their mothers-in-law. Innumerable old women have their last days made bitter to them by the knowledge that they are unwelcome guests in their sons’ houses and that their daughters-in-law hate them. Innumerable men are made miserable by being torn between the two women they love, who fight over them like dogs over a bone. Discussing this subject the other day, a woman who is a mother-in-law said:

“Like everything else, the mother-in-law question is a fifty-fifty proposition, and when they don’t get along together both are to blame. Certainly it isn’t an easy thing for a woman who has run her own house and been at the head of everything to take a back seat in her daughter-in-law’s home. And it isn’t easy to forget that your children are your children and to keep hands off in their affairs and treat them with the formality you would strangers.

“On the other hand, most daughters-in-law meet their mothers-in-law with a chip on their shoulders and are always hunting for trouble. They seem to feel that when a man marries he should forget the mother who bore him and wipe out the memory of all the years of close association that there has been between them. They are even jealous of the slightest attention and consideration that their husbands show their mothers.

“They seem to forget that if it wasn’t for these much-resented mothers-in-law they wouldn’t have any husbands at all, and that the better husbands they have the more they owe to their mothers-in-law.

“For if a man is tender, and kind, and generous, and considerate to his wife, it is because his mother has taught him to be chivalrous to women. She has trained him to be a good husband just as she has trained him to be a good citizen, and he honors and respects his wife because he so greatly honors and respects his mother.

“You never saw a bad son who was a good husband. You never hear of a man who abused and cursed his mother, and regarded her as only a slave to wait upon him, who didn’t treat his wife the same way. And so we mothers who raise up clean, straight sons, who enter into marriage with high ideals and a determination to cherish their wives and make them happy, have done the girls who get them such a service as they could not repay if they were down on their knees before us the balance of their days.

“But if any daughter-in-law has ever lifted her voice in thanks to her mother-in-law for teaching her son to be unselfish, or to be generous with money, or to pay her the little attentions that women love, I have never heard of it.

“And there is another queer thing about daughters-in-law. They seem to think that marriage should obliterate a man’s past and break all the ties of his life.

“He and his mother may have been the closest of companions; he may have asked her advice on every subject and talked over all of his plans with her, but woe be unto all concerned if he tries that after he takes a wife.

“Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the wife grows green-eyed and considers it rank treachery to her, and for the sake of peace mother and son have to forego the little talks that were such a joy to them both or else do this stealthily and hold a stolen rendezvous.

“Yet it does look as if any woman who wasn’t a moron would have sense enough to see that any man who could forget his mother and all he owed to her would be such a disloyal creature that he would forget his wife when some younger and fairer woman came along.

“Of course, the chief charge that our daughters-in-law have against us is that we are always meddling in their affairs. Perhaps we do, but aren’t our children’s affairs our affairs too? Hasn’t the mother who has raised her son to manhood and who has made him strong and capable of earning a fine salary a right to say something when she sees his hard-earned money being wasted, his home neglected and his health ruined by bad cooking?

“If a mother saw her own daughter treating her husband that way, she would rebuke her and show her where she was making a fatal mistake, and the daughter would not resent it. Why can’t a daughter-in-law take the same advice and profit by it, instead of flying at the throat of the mother-in-law and considering herself a martyr to mother-in-lawism?

“Of course, there are exceptions to all rules. I know daughters-in-law who are real daughters to their husbands’ mothers. I even know daughters-in-law who have borne with angelic patience cranky women who could not even get along with their own daughters. And I know mothers-in-law whose presence is like a benediction in a house and others who are firebrands wherever they go. So perhaps there is no way to settle the question so long as we are all human and not female saints. But God pity the mother who is obliged to live with her children, no matter how kind they may be! She is always the fifth wheel, and feels it. Perhaps those savages who kill off all the old people haven’t such a bad plan of disposing of the question, after all.”

XXVIII
WHY OUR FAMILIES RILE US

A woman wants to know why it is that we find it harder to get along with our families than we do with other people, and why our own blood-and-kin rile us more than anybody else on earth. Probably the main reason why we find it so difficult to live in peace and harmony with those who are really near and dear to us is because we are too much alike. We have inherited the same traits of character, and when these come in collision there is a resounding crash, and the noise of wrecked tempers and exploding wrath.

Father, an iron-willed, tyrannical gentleman, who has ruled his little world like a despot, cannot get along with John, who is of the same fiber, and equally determined to have his own way and do as he pleases. Father and John may have a very sincere affection for each other and admire each other’s good qualities, but they can never be together an hour without getting into a fight over something.

Mother is a born manager, one of the ladies who honestly believe, with the famous Frenchman, that she could have saved the Almighty from making some mortifying mistakes if she had been consulted at the creation. Mary is mother’s own daughter in her perfect belief that she knows exactly how to run the universe. What wonder, then, that they clash over every gown and hat that is bought; over every man that comes to see Mary; over everywhere that Mary goes?

Sometimes the reason that we can’t get along with our own people is because we are so entirely different from them. Often and often children are changelings, and those of our own flesh have no tie of spiritual kinship with us. The father who is a hard-headed, practical business man has nothing in common with the son who is a quivering bunch of nerves and sensibilities; who is a dreamer of dreams, and who counts wealth in terms of beauty, instead of dollars. Mother, who was a beauty and a belle in her day, with scores of lovers sighing at her feet, has looked forward to reliving her triumphs in her daughter. And when daughter grows up to be a big, sturdy young person who wants to go into business and who loathes society, what wonder that they get on each other’s nerves?

When you hear parents speak bitterly of what a disappointment children are, and how ungrateful, it merely means that their children are different from them. John insists on being a doctor or a lawyer instead of going into the hardware business father has been building up for him for twenty years. Mary wants to marry a poor young man, instead of the nice, settled, rich widower mother has picked out for her. Other people find John brilliant and talented. Father calls him a fool to his face because he won’t do father’s way. Other women are sympathetic with Mary’s romance, and her willingness to sacrifice riches for love. It infuriates mother to see her throwing an establishment and pearls and a limousine away, for a sentiment.

Often the reason we cannot get along with our own families is because they are like a mirror in which we see our own faults in all their hideousness. Father’s lack of ambition that has kept him from making anything of his life; mother’s shiftlessness and wastefulness that have kept the family poor; brother’s brutal temper; sister’s sharp tongue that cuts like a two-edge sword—these irritate us, and we find them harder to forgive than we would such defects in other people because we know that we are, ourselves, prone to just these weaknesses.

Besides these fundamental reasons why it is hard to get along with our relatives, there are a thousand minor causes of discord. One of the principal ones is the lack of politeness in the family circle, for most people feel that good manners are like good clothes, and should be worn only for the benefit of company. It is an amazing but true thing that practically the only people who ever say mean, insulting, wounding things to us are those of our own household.

Strangers listen to us with apparent interest, and laugh at our jokes. Our friends compliment our new frocks and cars. If our casual acquaintances do not like our taste or respect our judgment, they keep silent about it. It is our families who stab our vanity to the quick by yawning in our faces, and asking us if we are going to tell that old story over again; who bluntly inform us that our new hat is ten years too young for us, and that there is nothing so ridiculous as old women trying to be flappers; who criticize the way we are raising our children, and tell us the home truths we would rather die than hear.

Still another reason why it is hard to get along with our families is because it is generally held that the mere fact that you love people gives you a perfect right to nag them. We speak of family ties as binding. Binding is right, for in the average home no one can rise up or sit down, eat or fast, go or come, without having to give an account of why he or she did it or didn’t do it, and being advised to do it some other way.

It is for these, and a thousand other reasons, that we find it difficult to get along with our families, and fly to those who do not feel that they have a right to boss, correct, advise or otherwise interfere with us in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.

XXIX
OUR LIVES ARE WHAT WE MAKE THEM

You have been in factory towns where more or less benevolent corporations have built rows upon rows of houses, each one as like its neighbor as peas in a pod. But one house would have dirty, grimy, unwashed windows, with old newspapers or rags stuffed in a broken window pane. The yard would be filled with old cans and ashes and refuse, and the place would look like a shack, unfit for human habitation.

The house next door would have bright and shining windows, with clean, freshly starched muslin curtains and a gay red geranium in a pot showing between them. Flowers would be blooming in the yard, and a vine trained over the doorway, and the place would be a home, bright, cheerful and attractive. Yet the two houses were exactly alike. The only difference was in what the people in them made of them.

One cook can take a cheap cut of meat and a handful of vegetables and make of them a ragout, over which an epicure would smack his lips. Another cook will take the same meat and vegetables and make of them a watery stew, with neither flavor nor nutriment to it. It is the same material, but the difference is in the cooks.

That is the way it is all through life. There are a few fortunate individuals who seem to be the darlings of the gods, and with whom Lady Luck walks hand in hand. And there are also a few miserable ones who appear to have been born double-crossed by fate. But the great majority of us get a pretty even deal. We have the same family relationships. We go to the same schools. We have the same chance to work, and the balance is up to us. We are happy or miserable, successful or failures, rich or poor, according to what we make out of our lives. We marry, millions of us. And set up homes. One out of every seven of the marriages ends in divorce. More than three-fourths of the homes are wrecked, not because there is anything especially wrong, not because either husband or wife is an outbreaking criminal, but because they are too ignorant or too selfish to make their marriage a success.

All husbands and wives are cut off the same bolt of humanity. No man is perfect. No woman is an angel. No domestic machine runs along without a jar or a hitch. Every marriage calls for sacrifices, for patience, for forgiveness, endurance, and you get out of it just what you put into it—heaven or hell.

You go to homes that simply irradiate peace and love and good cheer, where there is a happy and contented man, and a smiling and blissful woman: where there are fine children growing up in the right atmosphere. And you go to another home that is a place of torment, where a surly man snarls and snaps, and a disgruntled woman whines and complains, and unruly, uncontrolled children fight like the Kilkenny cats.

Yet both of these families started out with the same equipment. Both couples were in love when they were married. Both had about the same amount of money. Both were called upon to make the same sacrifices. Both had the same chances at happiness. Yet one made a success of marriage, and the other failed.

We talk about opportunity, and when we fail we lay the blame on luck. We say we never had a chance. But the truth is that we are our own luck, that we make our own opportunities.

Did you ever think that every day in the year there are thousands of green country boys going into every big city, seeking their fortunes, and thousands of city boys leaving those same cities because they think that everything is overcrowded and overdone, and that they have no opportunity there? And many of those country boys will find the chance the city boy overlooked, and pick up the fortune he passed by.

The world is full of failures, croaking that there is no money in farming or the mercantile business, and warning young men that they will starve if they become lawyers, or doctors, or actors, or writers, or artists. Yet there are rich farmers with bursting granaries. Everywhere millionaire business men. There are world-famous lawyers and doctors and matinée idols and men who write best sellers.

And the successes are side by side with the failures, working in the same environment, under the same conditions, and the only difference is the difference in the men themselves. It is the difference in the energy, the grit, the determination, the stick-at-iveness, the heart and soul and brains that one man put into his work and the other didn’t. Whether we are happy or not depends upon ourselves, for in reality we all have pretty much the same raw material with which to work.

Sickness, suffering, the death of those we love, disappointment, come to us all. The poorest woman alive and the millionairess bear their children in the same agony, and weep the same tears over little coffins. Money does not buy love, tenderness, nor peace of mind, and just as many hearts ache under silver brocade as under cotton.

But we can hold our souls serene if we will. We can keep from fretting. We can resolutely extract the sweet instead of the bitter out of life. We can dwell on our blessings instead of our miseries, and we can acquire a philosophy that will enable us to laugh instead of weep over the misadventures that befall us.

For our lives are what we make them. It is all up to us.

XXX
HUSBAND LOSERS

Three divorced women were talking together the other day and one of them said:

“When we wives lose our husbands we always accuse some other woman of having stolen them from us; and we cry out that our husbands are cruel ingrates, who have taken the best years of our lives and then thrown us aside like broken toys when we were no longer young and beautiful. And we pose as blameless martyrs who are the pitiful victims of man’s perfidy.

“Of course, it saves our faces to be able to lay all the blame for our wrecked homes on others, and it soothes our hurt vanity to be wept over as a poor, innocent, deserted wife. But in the still watches of the night, when we have it out with our own souls, there are mighty few of us who can shrive our consciences and know that we are blameless.

“Most of us know in our heart of hearts that if our husband’s love died, we did our part in administering the lethal dose. We may have done it through ignorance, through carelessness, through blundering stupidity; we may have even done it with the best intentions in the world and with the firm conviction that we were forcing down their throats a remedy that would cure them of all the little ailments and weakness of character from which they suffered. But the point is, we did it. We were accessory to the crime, and we could have prevented it if we had so wished.

“Now, as you know, my husband forsook me for his secretary. I called her a thief who had used her position to rob me of a husband and my little children of their father, and I looked upon him with bitterness and contempt, as a poor weakling who let an adventuress make him forget his honor as a man and his duty to his wife and children. I called Heaven to witness that I was innocent and that I had been a good, true, virtuous woman, who had always done her duty to her family. It took me a long time to see that, if my husband grew weary of me, I had made him tired by my incessant nagging and fault finding; that if he ceased to love me, it was because I was no longer lovable, and that the other woman had not really stolen him from me. I had simply handed him over to her on a silver salver.

“You see, I was one of the wives who did not realize that it is easy enough to get a husband, but the work comes in in keeping one. I thought that after a woman was married she could let herself go, and so I never bothered to keep myself dolled up at home, or to try to make myself pleasant and agreeable. I went in negligee, both as to clothes and manners. Any old rag was good enough to wear at home. Any disagreeable topic was a suitable breakfast-table discussion, and I felt perfectly free to quarrel with my husband, and criticize him, and ridicule all of his little faults and idiosyncrasies.

“I forgot that he went from a sloppy wife to an office where a trim, perfectly groomed woman, younger and better looking than I, waited for him. I forgot that he went from my nagging and fault finding to a girl who was paid to agree with him and whose job depended largely on her flattering him and telling him how wonderful and great he was. It wouldn’t have been human for him not to constitute a daily comparison between us, and it was inevitable that when he did, that I should lose out. If I had kept my doors locked and my burglar alarms in working order no one could have looted my home. And so I am just as responsible for the wreck of it as are those who broke it up.”

“My husband was a gay, pleasure-loving man,” said the second divorcee. “He always wanted to be going somewhere. He loved to be in the thick of crowds. He adored dancing, and restaurants, and the bright lights. He loved fine clothes, and always wanted me to look like a fashion plate. Now, I am a serious-minded woman and was brought up to take a serious view of things, and I felt it my duty to cure my husband of his frivolity by leading him up to what I considered the higher life. I began by trying to wean him away from his old friends, on whom I turned such a cold shoulder that they soon ceased coming to the house. I lectured him about his extravagance and the way he threw away money, and finally got possession of the family purse and doled out dimes to him. I wouldn’t go out with him of an evening, and I rarely let him go without a scene. At first he submitted, but he looked bored and sulky, and then he broke out of jail, which was all his home had come to be to him, and that was the beginning of the end.

“For, of course, when I wouldn’t play with him he found some other woman who would, and who wouldn’t wet-blanket every occasion by her moral strictures or spoil every meal at a restaurant by looking at the pay check. If I had been willing to flatter him, and jolly him, and dance with him, and let him spend his money on me, he would never have left me. But I wouldn’t do it, and my austerity got on his nerves. He wanted a playmate instead of a censor, and so I feel that I am just as much to blame as he was.”

“I lost my husband through ambition,” said the third divorcee. “He was an artist of great talent, and I was mad for him to win fame and money, so I never let him rest. I prodded him on all the time. I was forever a goad in his side, and so I became to him a sort of incarnate conscience, a perpetual reminder of all the unpleasant duties of life. He was temperamental, a child of impulse, and I became his task-mistress, a slave driver to him. Finally he got to the place where he could stand it no more, and he eloped with a young girl as irresponsible as he was. She will never push him on to success as I would have done, but she lets him follow every whim and she will hold him, as I could have done if I had had intelligence enough to see that you can’t make a work horse out of Pegasus.”

“How much happiness we might save if only our wisdom did not come too late,” sighed the first woman.

XXXI
MARTHA OR MARY?

Clever Mary—who, take it from me, knows her way about—was talking about her friend, Martha, the other day.

“Of course, Martha is the Perfect Housewife,” she said, “but she is a mighty poor wife. Without doubt, she is a great and glorious housekeeper and a cook and baker and cleaner. Never have I seen a rumple in her curtains. Her bedspreads are like the driven snow. And you could eat off her floors. Her house is so immaculate that her husband must feel a perfect stranger in it, and like a bull in a china shop.

“But her days are so taken up with work that she has time for nothing else—not a minute to read or to play, or to be a companion to her husband. In fact, she is so worn out by the time night comes that she is too tired to do anything but go to bed.

“Her husband loves to read, but if he sits up late, the light annoys her so much that she can’t sleep, so she says. So she nags him until he gives it up in disgust. She, herself, never reads anything except the advertisements of the department stores in the papers, and the thrilling accounts of vacuum cleaners and patent breakfast foods in the backs of the magazines. And when her husband tries to talk to her about the things he is interested in—books, sports, his business—he had just as well try to ring any other dumbbell.

“Now, I do all my own housework, and I must be a fairly capable housewife, for my mother-in-law has put her O.K. on me, and that settles that. But there isn’t a spot in my house where we can’t park ourselves at any time. My library table is filled with books and magazines, and if husband drops ashes and scatters the Sunday papers all over the place, I let him, and gently and painlessly remove them after he has passed on.

“I don’t really know anything about sports. I wouldn’t recognize a home run if I met it on the street, but when hubby wants to talk about baseball I assume an intelligent expression. And I am never too tired to play with my husband. I grab my hat the minute he suggests the movies. I can get ready to go anywhere in an hour. I just adjust my complexion—Martha considers that a real vice—and we are off.

“Martha can’t understand why my husband very rarely goes away from home of an evening and almost never without me—while hers beats it to the corner drug store as soon as he has eaten his superexcellent dinner. And I just can’t make her see that it is because she puts her house before him. She worships cleanliness and order, and sacrifices everything to them. The first thing Martha knows, she is going to lose her husband, and she will go around wailing and weeping and telling how hard she worked and what a good housekeeper she was. She never will know that she literally drove him away from her with a broom handle.

“I told Martha the other day that if she would spend less time polishing her mahogany and more time polishing her finger nails and rubbing up her mind, it would be better for her. But she just smiled that superior smile that a model housekeeper always bestows on the woman whom she suspects of having dust on the back pantry shelf, and made a dive for a basement sale of somebody’s patent cleaning fluid.”

Mary is right. Cleanliness and order are two of the domestic virtues that may easily be converted into vices. We all know spick and span houses that are no more homes than a shiny tin box would be. Nobody would dare disarrange a sofa cushion in one of them. Nobody would have the courage to move a chair from its appointed place. To track a bit of mud on one of the shining floors would be a high crime and misdemeanor. To leave anything hanging around would be a sacrilege unspeakable.

Husband and children flee these temples of order and cleanliness as they would a torture chamber. And they live in dread and fear of the woman who has worked herself cross and irritable attaining her ideal of housewifery. Most of the real homes are places not too bright and good for human nature’s daily use. They are places where you can take your ease; places run on a flexible schedule and only reasonably clean and orderly.

Doubtless, the old lady who laid down the maxim, “Feed the brute,” as a rule for retaining a husband’s affections said a wise mouthful to women. But more is to be added, for man does not live by bread alone, and it is just as important to feed his soul as his stomach. Every woman who fails to give her husband good, nourishing food fails as a wife, but she fails even more if she does not give him companionship. For, after all, there is a good restaurant on every corner where a man can satisfy his physical hunger, but none but his wife can minister to his spiritual hunger. Foolish is the woman who doesn’t realize this and who spends her time keeping her house clean instead of making it a home.

But that is the trouble with matrimony. A woman can’t be either a Martha or a Mary. To be a good wife she has got to be both.

XXXII
THE T. B. M. AT HOME

A man wants to know if I don’t think his wife is very wrong and foolish to be hurt and offended because he is often irritable and cross at home. He says that she knows that he adores her, and that he is a model of all the standardized domestic virtues, but that he works all day under a terrific strain, and by the time night comes his nerves are worn to a frazzle. He thinks that his wife should appreciate this, and that instead of further rasping them with argumentation, she should apply a soothing emolument to them.

I agree with the gentleman that it is always the part of prudence for a wife to give the soft answer that turneth away wrath, instead of retorting with a snappy comeback when her husband makes a nasty crack at her. It certainly doesn’t add to the peace and harmony of a home for a wife to be ready to jump into her fighting clothes every time her husband makes a pass at her. Nothing comes of family rows but bitterness, and anger, and disillusion. Nor does any love long survive them.

I also agree with the gentleman that any woman who has cut her wisdom teeth on matrimony should be able to assay her husband’s temper and tell how much of it is due to raw nerves and how much to pure cussedness, and so know when to spread the salve and when to hand him a solar-plexus blow. Furthermore, I opine that a wife who starts anything with her husband at evening until after he is fed and rested, and has had his smoke and his paper unmolested, deserves to be put in the Home for the Incurably Feeble-Minded for the balance of her natural life or else bound over by the courts to keep the peace. For she is either lacking in brains or just loves a fight for the fight’s sake.

It is the greatest possible pity that women haven’t more sense of humor than they have, for if they did they would be able to laugh at many things their husbands do over which they shed scalding tears. It would enable them to see how really funny it is for a big man to get into a babyish tantrum over nothing and how much easier it is to kid him out of it than it is to make a scene over it. Unhappily, however, few women have a funny bone, and fewer still can see the joke when it is on them, and so husbands and wives meet temper with temper and irritability with irritability, and the domestic war goes merrily on.

The mistake that most wives make is in taking their husbands too seriously. They have heard so much about the mighty masculine intellect that they think their husbands are profound, thoughtful human beings who mean every word they say and whose every act is part of a deeply considered plan of life. Whereas the truth is that men babble just as meaninglessly as women do, and are the creatures of impulse. Also, women are under the misapprehension that they have a monopoly on nerves, and that hysterics are the sole prerogative of the feminine sex.

These beliefs make women attach a significance to the things that men say and do to which they are not entitled; and it makes them “get their husbands wrong” and break their hearts over crimes that the poor, blundering men do not even know that they are committing.

In consequence whereof the wife’s feelings are in a constant state of laceration, and she meets each hard knock with a still harder one, or else goes off and salts her wounds down in the brine of her tears.

Now, no one will argue that a human cyclone is a pleasant companion to live with, nor would any sane woman pick out a man who is giving a life-like imitation of the Day of Wrath with whom to spend her evenings. But, all the same, women make themselves unnecessarily miserable by taking their husbands’ humors too seriously.

The cruel speeches that stab the wife to the soul are not prompted by malice toward her. They are the reaction of nerves that have been frazzled to the breaking point by the worries of the day at the office. The frozen silence which the wife finds it so hard to endure is just sheer exhaustion of mind and body, and the woman who can just take her husband’s moods this way can not only save herself many a tearfest, but can make her husband eat out of her hand by feeding him and laughing at him and jollying him along.

Certainly, the woman who is married to a nervous, overworked man might well do a little mental balancing of accounts and check off a lot of temper, and impatience, and unreason, and fault finding against the finery he gives her, and the success he has achieved, of which she is so proud and which he has literally bought with his life’s blood. She might well forgive his faults and deal leniently with them, since they are the direct result of his struggle to lap her in luxury.

She is, believe me, a discerning and a tender wife who answers her husband’s irascible speeches with a pat on the head and a “there, there, it’s all right,” as she would a sick and fretful child, instead of going to the mat with him.

So much for the wife’s side of the question. Now for the husband’s.

Business furnishes no alibi for surliness, and grouchiness, and general disagreeableness. No man has a right to come home at night and dump down on his own hearthstone all the nerves, and temper, and irritability he has kept bottled up in him all day.

Because a woman has the misfortune to be a man’s wife is no reason he should insult her and say to her things that he would not say to any other woman who had an able-bodied brother, or that he would not dream of saying to any woman who had $10 to spend across his counter, or who was his client, or his patient.

If a man can control his temper and his tongue in dealing with the outside world, he can control it still at home. If he can be polite and courteous and flattering to other women, he can make the same gracious speeches to his wife, instead of growling like a bear when she asks him a simple question. And if he has any sense of honor, he will be the more careful of what he says to his wife than he is to the others, because his attitude means nothing to them, but his wife’s whole happiness is dependent on the way he treats her.

Nor does the fact that he overworks excuse a man’s irritability at home. Nine wives out of ten would rather have a little more amiability from their husbands and less money, if they had to choose between the two. The beloved husbands and wives are not those who work themselves into a state of nervous irritability for their families. They are those who keep themselves calm, and good natured, and pleasant to live with.

To expect other people to overlook our temper and forgive the cross and cruel speeches that we flash out at them without provocation is demanding too much of human nature.

XXXIII
DON’T BE AFRAID TO LET YOUR HUSBAND SEE YOU LOVE HIM

A woman asks this question: “Is it wise for a wife who loves her husband devotedly to let him see how dear he is to her? Does the knowledge that her heart is his for keeps make him undervalue it? Does she best keep his interest in her alive by keeping him on the anxious seat? After all, a husband is still a man, and we know that before marriage the more difficult a woman is to win the more a man chases her; and the more a woman throws herself at a man’s head the more adroitly he dodges her. So the question is, Does this same state of affairs continue after marriage? Do men want their wives to blow hot and cold, as they do their sweethearts, or do they desire them to be a good, steady, reliable fire on the hearthstone?”

A man’s attitude toward love undergoes a complete change on his wedding day. During his courtship, the thing that has been of more importance to him than anything else in the world has been the state of mind of his lady love. It has been a wonderful, sentimental adventure following all her moods and tenses, and plumbing the depths of her emotions. It has roused his sporting blood for her to be coy and difficult. Taking her away from his rivals was a game of fascinating intrigue, and he thrilled with the sense of being a conquering hero when she finally surrendered to him.

But marriage is another pair of sleeves. It is a different story altogether. A man marries to end romance, not to have it to-be-continued-in-our-next serial that will run on the balance of his life. He wants to be done with doubts, and fears, and heart burnings, and speculation about the woman he loves, so that he will be free to give his undivided attention to his business.

Therefore the tactics that won a woman a husband do not serve to hold him, and the wife who tries to pique her husband’s interest in her by her flirtations with other men is more apt to land in the divorce court than to strengthen her position in the domestic love nest. For men do not wish to be kept guessing about their wives. They want to be sure of them. The man who is married to a woman who plays around with other men and who keeps him on the ragged edge of nervous prostration with jealousies and suspicions does not think that he has drawn a capital prize in the matrimonial lottery. On the contrary, he thinks that he has been gold-bricked, and he is not crazy over his bargain.

No woman need be afraid to let her husband know how much she loves him, because her love makes the strongest claim she can possibly have upon him. Many a man who has made an unsuitable marriage with a woman with whom he had no real companionship; many a man who has outgrown the woman he married in his youth, is kept faithful to her by the knowledge of her devotion to him. It takes a brute to hurt the one who worships you, or to leave the one whose whole life is bound up in you.

Nor is there any charm of mind or person that appeals to a man so much as just the certainty of a wife’s love and the sure knowledge that if all the world turned against him, there is one who would still be standing shoulder to shoulder with him; some one who would go down to the gates of death with him, or wait outside of the prison gates for him; some one whom neither disease nor poverty nor disgrace would alienate from him. The coquettish woman who thinks to keep her husband’s affection for her at fever heat by keeping him uncertain of her has no such hold upon her man as has the wife whose husband’s heart doth safely trust in her, sure that whatever else fails him in life, her love will never fail.

A wife need not be afraid to show her husband her love, because men are just as heart hungry as women are. They crave affection and appreciation just as much as women do, and they long just as much as women do to be petted and fussed over.

No complaint is more common from women than that their husbands stop all love-making at the altar with a suddenness that jars the very marrow of their bones. They say that the men to whom they are married never seem to think that they long to be told that they are still loved and admired, and that they have made good as wives. They yearn for a kiss that is warm with passion, instead of a duty peck on the cheek that has about as much flavor to it as a cold batter cake.

But, apparently, it never occurs to these wives who are starving for some sign of real living affection themselves that their husbands are also on the bread line, mutely begging for a stray crumb of love. They do not realize that a great big, husky, successful man could want to be chucked under the chin, and babied, and told that he was the most booful thing on earth, and that his wifeikins got down on her knees and thanked God every night because she was lucky enough to get him, and that every day, in every way, she loved him better and better.

Yet there isn’t a man in the world that wouldn’t worship a wife who handed him that line of chatter, and who wouldn’t walk mighty straight and reverently before one who opened the doors of her heart and let him see that he was enshrined therein. No. No wife need be afraid of letting her husband know how much she worships him. For it is love that makes the world go round, and that greases the wheels of matrimony.

XXXIV
QUEER THINGS ABOUT MARRIAGE

Did you ever think how many queer things there are about marriage? To begin with, isn’t it queer that we permit boys and girls to get married at an age at which they are not permitted to make any other binding contract? The law appoints guardians to look after the property of minors, and prevent them from squandering it, or being cheated out of it by sharpers, but there is no legal safeguard to save foolish girls and boys from throwing away their life’s happiness on an ill-advised marriage.

At a time of life when we consider a lad’s judgment too immature for him to make a thousand-dollar investment, we assume that he is worldly wise enough to pick out a life mate. At an age when we think a girl’s taste too unformed and too hectic to select her own clothes, we let her choose a husband.

Isn’t the casual attitude we take toward matrimony queer?

Marriage is the most important act in our lives, the thing that not only makes or mars us, but that affects thousands of people yet to be. Compared with marriage, being born is a mere episode in our careers, and dying a trivial incident. Yet there is no other thing that we do to which we give as little intelligent, serious thought.

If we were going into a business partnership to invest our entire fortune, we would think a long time before we committed ourselves. We would consider the proposition from every angle. We would look into its weak spots and try to form an honest opinion of its chances of success. And we would investigate the past record of the man we were proposing to go into business with, and find out everything about him.

We would ascertain what sort of a life he had led, how honest and honorable he was, how much he was to be trusted, and what sort of a disposition he had, whether he was pleasant to get along with or not. Yet the worst harm that our business partner could do us would be to cheat us out of our money. He couldn’t break our hearts and make our lives miserable. If we didn’t like him, we could dissolve the partnership without any trouble or disgrace.

But nine times out of ten those who enter into the marriage contract, which is the most binding contract of all, do not take the trouble to make even the slightest investigation about the one with whom he or she is making a life partnership. Every day we read of people who discover that they are married to bigamists. Every day some husband stumbles into his wife’s skeleton closet, and finds that the woman whom he believed pure and innocent has a dark and sordid past. Every day some agonized mother looks at her deformed or idiotic babe, and sees that the sins of the father have been visited on her child.

The man was handsome, and he danced well, and he had a dandy sport model car. The girl was pretty, and she had a cute trick of looking up through her lashes, or a baby stare, so they got married without bothering to find out a single thing about the kind of life each had led before they met. They wouldn’t have bought a house without having had an expert see that its title was clear and that there was no mortgage on it, but they will marry without finding out what sort of encumbrances are on the lives of their husbands and wives. They wouldn’t buy a horse or a dog without looking into its pedigree and finding out what sort of stock it comes from, and whether it is sound in wind and limb, but they will pass diseased blood on to their children with no thought of the sort of heredity with which they are cursing them.

Isn’t it queer that men and women fail to consider the dispositions of those they marry? Yet that is the thing that people have to live with, and it is what makes marriage a success or a failure. It isn’t high and noble principles; it isn’t truth and honor and honesty that makes or mars a man’s or woman’s happiness in marriage. It is the temper of their husbands or wives. A man may be a model of all the virtues, and yet if he is stingy and grouchy and gloomy, his wife will be miserable with him. A woman may be as chaste as Cæsar’s wife, yet if she nags, her husband will rue the day he led her to the altar.

All men and women know this, yet a girl will go along and marry a man who even before marriage gets the sulks over every little thing that goes wrong, with whom she has to always walk on eggs to avoid riling him, and who carries his small change in a purse with a snap lock. And a man will marry a thin, nervous, irritable girl, who is always getting peeved about everything, and who never can say a thing and let it rest. And they both wonder after marriage why marriage is a failure, and why they can’t get along together.

Isn’t it queer that people don’t pick out the kind of husbands and wives that they want, and that will suit them?

A man who is a student will marry a silly little girl who hasn’t two ideas in her head to rub together. In the days of courtship it was inevitable that he should take the measure of her brainlessness and find out that when he talked to her of books that he spoke of an unexplored world to her, and that when he discussed the things in which he was interested she yawned in his face. Nor could he help perceiving that her chatter was the chatter of a magpie, and the things in which she delighted were things that bored him stiff.

His common sense shrieked to him that marriage between two people who had not one single idea, nor an ideal, nor a thought, nor a desire, in common was bound to be a failure. But the man, wise and sophisticated in other things, but clinging blindly to his superstitious belief in the potency of the marriage ceremony, refused to heed the warning.

Somehow, he was confident that just getting married would change a silly, ignorant girl into an intellectual woman who would be a fit companion to him; miraculously render one who had never even read a sixth best-seller familiar with the world’s best literature, and make her prefer to discuss world topics to gossip about the people next door.

We wonder why poor men marry fashion-plates; why men who love to eat, marry girls who loathe the kitchen; why quiet, domestic men marry girls who live to dance and go to cabarets. They are all poor, blind heathen, trusting in the marriage ceremony to make an extravagant girl economical, a frivolous girl serious, an undomestic girl domestic.

Isn’t it queer? Not only do we superstitiously believe in the power of the marriage ceremony to change other people, but we actually think it will change ourselves.

The philanderer believes that he will never cast a roaming eye at another woman as soon as he is married. The loafer believes that he will be filled full of pep and energy by the mere fact of having a wife to work for. The stingy, selfish man is confident that he will enjoy spending money on his family. The girl who has never thought of anything but dolling herself up and having a good time believes that as soon as she is married she won’t care any more for fine clothes or going about, and that she will be perfectly satisfied to stay at home and save her husband’s money and cook him good things to eat.

But alas! the miracle of the marriage ceremony no more works on us than it does on those we marry. Long before the honeymoon has waned we make the discovery that somehow the mysterious something that was to change us didn’t take, and that we are the same old individuals, with the same old tastes and desires that we always had. Then to so many comes the cold, bitter knowledge that they are tied for life to one who is utterly uncongenial, to one who bores them and gets upon their nerves. And, queerest of all is it that no matter how unhappily people have been married, when death or divorce sets them free, they nearly all want to try matrimony over again!

XXXV
HUSBANDS—THE LIVING CONUNDRUM

A woman writes me that she has been married to a man for sixteen years, yet she has never got acquainted with him. She says he is good and kind, but indifferent to her. He never finds fault with her and never praises her. He spends his evenings at home by his own fireside, but a mummy would be just about as conversational. All of this has got the woman guessing, and she can’t figure out whether her husband still cares for her or not, or whether he regards his marriage as a success or a failure.

Good gracious, sister, don’t imagine for an instant that you have anything unique in the way of a husband! All men are full of curious peculiarities, and no woman ever gets acquainted with one, no matter whether she has been married to him for sixteen years or sixty. For, as an old colored friend of mine says: “Husbands is the most undiscovered nation of people there is.”

No woman ever understands, for instance, why it is that a man who was an ardent and impetuous wooer turns into a husband with about as much sentiment and pep to him as a cold buckwheat cake, as soon as the marriage ceremony is said over him. Nor can she form any idea of why the man who was willing to risk his life to get her takes so little interest in her after he has got her. She cannot doubt that he loved her, because he gave great and indisputable proof of that by assuming her support for life. Nor can she see any reason for his change of attitude. She still carries the same line of bait with which she caught him. She still has the same eyes that he likened to violets drenched in dew, but he doesn’t notice them. She still has the same white hands that he used to hold by the hour, but if she wants anybody to hold them now she has to hunt up some man to whom she is not married. No woman can ever understand why a man doesn’t put forth the same effort to make his home a going concern as he does to make his business or profession a success.

If every man tried to sell himself to his wife as he does to his employer, or a big customer, or a valuable client, there would be no disgruntled, dissatisfied married women in the world. If every man studied his wife’s peculiarities of disposition; if he played on her weaknesses as deftly and handled her as tactfully as he does a merchant who is about to place a big order, or a rich patient, every wife in the land would be eating out of her husband’s hand. If every man paid his wife a fair wage for her services, as he does his stenographers and clerks, it would take the heaviest curse off matrimony for millions of wives.

But, altho to have a contented wife and a peaceful and happy home means more to a man than to make a million dollars, not one man in a hundred ever gives any real serious thought or makes any honest effort to make his marriage a success. He leaves the most important thing in his life to chance, and he wins out or loses, according to whether fortune is with him or not. Women never can understand why their husbands refuse to handle them diplomatically, when it would be money in their pockets to use the velvet glove instead of the strong-arm method.

Every man knows that he can jolly his wife into doing anything, and doing without anything. He knows that if he hands her a few cheap compliments about what a wonderful manager she is and how she helps him, she will squeeze every nickel. Every man knows that if he tells his wife how beautiful and lovely she looks in her last year’s dress, she wouldn’t trade it off for the latest Paris importation. Every man knows that he can kiss his wife’s eyes shut until she will be blind as a bat, and that he has only to give her a warm smack on the lips to make her dumb as an oyster.

And every wife knows that her husband knows these things about her, because she has furnished him with a complete diagram about how to work her. And she never knows whether to be mad at him or disgusted with him, because he would rather fight with her and pay for it in having to eat bad meals, and having his money wasted and buy her new frocks and limousines and pearls, than to take the trouble to flatter her a little and treat her the way she is begging to be treated.

Most of all, women never can understand why their husbands are so stingy with words, which surely are among the cheapest commodities on earth. Above everything else, every wife yearns for words of love, for words of praise from her husband. Just to have her husband pet her, to have him say to her that she grows dearer and dearer to him every day, and that he thanks God for giving her to him, pays any woman for all the sacrifice, all the work, all the suffering that marriage brings her. It makes her heart sing with joy, and the lack of it fills her life with tears of despair.

Every man knows this. Every man knows that he can make his wife happy with just a few words, and yet he withholds them. Even the men who really love their wives and appreciate all that their wives do for them refuse to give the starving souls the words that would be the bread of life to them. No. No wife ever gets acquainted with her husband. Husbands always keep us guessing to the end of the chapter. Perhaps that is why we all want one of these living conundrums.

XXXVI
THE POWER OF SUGGESTION

Among my acquaintances is a woman who has a pretty little flapper daughter. The girl is a good little girl, as playful and innocent as a kitten. But she bobs her hair, and paints her face, and rouges her lips, and likes to jazz, and joy-ride, and have a good time just as thousands of other girls of her age and class are doing. All this greatly outrages the mother, who tells her daughter that, in her day, decent girls didn’t paint their faces, or shimmy, and that they stayed at home evenings and read good books, instead of running around with japanned-haired boys. And then she winds up her preachment by accusing her daughter of doing things which she does not do, and prophesying that she will come to a bad end. Of course, it is mother love and mother anxiety that makes this woman keep continually before the girl’s eyes the fate of those who follow the road of pleasure. It never enters her head that she may be precipitating on her child the catastrophe she dreads, but that is precisely what she is doing.

She is making the girl feel that she is sophisticated and worldly-wise—one of the wild, wild women. She is giving the flavor of forbidden fruit to what would otherwise be harmless little amusements. She is making the girl reckless, because she is making her believe that she is under suspicion and is being talked about. Worst of all, she is firmly implanting in the girl’s mind the idea that she is expected to go wrong.

And if anything in the world will put the skids under a girl, it is for her own mother to be continually impressing upon her that she is a wrong ’un.

When you observe the dealings of parents with their children the thing at which you wonder most is that fathers and mothers never seem to realize the power of suggestion. Yet it is one of the most potent forces in the world, and one that can be directed with almost uncanny results to the molding and shaping of the characters of the young. It is hardly too much to say that as the parents think, so are the children. It is the fixed idea the parents stamp indelibly on the plastic childish mind which determines the fate in life of the man or woman.

You can, for instance, take a delicate child and literally “think” it into health or sickness. If the mother keeps the child forever reminded it can’t do what other children do because of its poor heart, it can’t eat this or that because of its bad digestion, and that it mustn’t be crossed because it is so nervous,—that child will grow up into a neurotic invalid. But if the mother impresses on it the thought that it is getting well, and is going to be strong and healthy, unless there is something radically organically wrong, it will overcome the weakness with which it was seemingly threatened.

All of us have seen people actually bring upon themselves diseases they believed they had inherited. They had had it impressed on them from their infancy that they were bound to die of consumption because all the Smiths had tuberculosis. Or, that they were doomed to perish with cancer, because cancer was in the Jones family. Or, to have rheumatism because the Simkins were all rheumatic, and they died of what they believed to be inherited diseases that science has proved not to be inheritable.

It is tragic to think how many parents have killed the children they loved by putting the death thought upon them, and by making them believe that they were doomed, and that there was no use in their trying to be strong and well. It is still more tragic to think of the millions of people who are failures in the world because their fathers and mothers have sapped their courage, and slain their initiative by implanting in their minds the conviction that they were dolts and had not the ability to succeed.

Once establish the inferiority complex in a child’s mind, and it is done for. It accepts the belief that it has no ability to do things, and it attempts nothing. It makes no struggle to rise. It slumps into the humble position its parents have assigned it. This is why perpetual fault-finding with a child intensifies its faults. To nag Johnny continually about his awkwardness, makes him still more awkward. To be forever calling attention to Tom’s shyness, makes him shrink more and more out of sight. To fret at Bob’s dulness, makes him feel that there is no hope for a boy who isn’t quick and alert. Many men never have the courage to demand their just deserts and take the place to which they are entitled in business and society because they were made self-conscious in their childhood. They had it so impressed on their minds that they were blundering louts, and stupid fools, that they shrank within themselves, and never had the nerve to push their fortunes.

And just as you can make a child a failure by holding the thought of its inferiority before it, you can do much to make it a success by holding the thought of achievement before it. We unconsciously strive to be what the people about us expect of us. If Jimmie knows that he has a reputation for beautiful manners, he will act as a gentleman. If Tom knows you expect him to make a mark at school or in business, he will try to make good. If Mary knows you do not think it possible for her to be anything but sweet and innocent, she is not likely to tarnish your ideal.

The power of suggestion is so far reaching in its influence that fathers and mothers should be careful how they use it, and avoid implanting a weak thought, an evil thought, a thought of failure in their children’s minds as they would avoid giving them poison.

XXXVII
WOMAN’S MISSIONARY OPPORTUNITY

As a sex women are highly altruistic. There is scarcely a movement in the world for the uplift of humanity or for ameliorating the sorrows of the poor and helpless that does not owe its existence to women. It is women who support the orphan asylums, the homes for old men and women, the reformatories, the houses for the blind, the places of refuge where the man just out of prison can go and gather himself together before starting out on a better life. It is women who nurse in hospitals, and who carry on mainly the work of the Red Cross and the fight against the great White Plague. Joan of Arc is the great feminine heroine. The women that other women envy most are not the great beauties and sirens of history, or the famous actors and writers, but the Florence Nightingales and Frances Willards who have been able to do some great service to their fellow creatures. And deep down in her secret heart, if every woman was granted her one great wish, it would be to be able to help her day and generation to make others happier, and to perform some miracle that would make life easier for all who come after her.

Well, little as she realizes it, that power is possessed by every woman who has children. In her hands lies the remedy for the greatest sorrow that tears at the hearts of men and women. She can wipe away half of the tears of the world. She has the magic that can change innumerable lives from misery to joy. For the greatest trouble in the world is domestic trouble. The bitterest disappointment is a marriage that is a failure. There is no place of torment so hard to endure as a home of bickering and strife. No enemy can stab you to the heart as does a cold, selfish, unkind husband or wife.

It lies within the power of mothers to put an end to all this misery, to stop divorce and the breaking up of homes, and the orphaning of helpless little children. It is in their power to provide every man and woman with a good husband and wife, to make every home a prosperous and peaceful one, and to save other mothers from the agony of seeing their children mistreated by the men and women to whom they are married. There is no more appalling thought than that every woman could raise her children up to be good husbands and wives, and that she does not do it. On the contrary, nine times out of ten she brings up her sons and daughters to be exactly the kind of husbands and wives from whom she prays God on her knees to deliver her own precious darlings.

Most likely the woman is herself the victim of another woman’s cruelty. Her own marriage has been wretched because her husband’s mother never taught him to treat women with any courtesy, or consideration, or chivalry. He was never brought up to consider a woman’s feelings, or even to extend to her common justice. As a result, his wife has had to walk on eggs to keep from rousing a demoniacal temper. She has had to wait on him hand and foot. She has had to wheedle every penny out of him, and never since her wedding day has her husband made one move to entertain or amuse her, or done anything to make her happy.

It would seem that a woman who had been through the arid desert of such a marriage would save some other poor girl from such a fate by raising up her son to be a good husband. You would think that she would teach him what a terrible crime it is to take a woman’s life into his hands and break it; that she would teach him to be gentle and tender to his wife; that she would impress upon him that a woman earns her share of the family income, and that it should be given to her outright instead of being doled out as alms.

You would think that she would ground him, from his infancy up, in the knowledge of all the little things that make a marriage a failure or a success to a woman—the little attentions, the little treats, the word of praise, the compliment on a new dress or hat, the little things that make a woman’s heart sing with joy, and that makes marriage worth while to her. The great majority of women, however, never even so much as think of training their sons to be good husbands. Nor do they train their daughters to be good wives. Very few mothers would be willing to see their sons marry the kind of girls their daughters are.

Mother has raised her daughters up to be selfish and spoiled and lazy and extravagant, and she is ready to foist them without mercy on any poor young fellows who are taken with their pretty faces. But Heaven defend her own boys from marrying girls who have never considered any other human being in the world but themselves, and whose only law is their own pleasure! You even hear mothers boast that they have never taught their daughters how to cook, or sew, or keep house, yet the very foundation of domestic happiness and the prosperity of the family depend upon the wife being a thrifty manager and making a comfortable home.

Nor do women instil into their daughters’ minds the truth about marriage—that it is an obligation that they take upon themselves, and that they have no right to throw it up and quit because it is full of hardships and self-sacrifice instead of being the joy-ride they thought it would be. Neither do mothers pass on to their daughters their own hardly won knowledge of how to get along with a husband, how to bear with him and forbear, how to jolly him and handle him with tact and diplomacy, yet that precious bit of information would save many a marriage. Believe me that the most important question that any mother can ask herself is this: “Am I raising up my son and daughter to bless or curse the woman and man who marry them?”

XXXVIII
HOW TO BE A GOOD HUSBAND

A young man said to me the other day: “I am going to be married, and I earnestly and honestly desire to make my wife happy, but beyond a vague and rudimentary impression that I must not beat or starve her, I haven’t an idea of how to go about the good-husband job. What should a man do to keep a woman blessing her lucky stars that she married him, instead of wondering what on earth the fool-killer was doing that she survived her wedding day?”

“Well, son,” I replied, “your theoretical ground work for being a good husband is a sound foundation on which to build, tho refraining from beating your wife is not the matter of course thing that you seem to think it is. There will be plenty of times when you will want to do so, and bitterly regret that no perfect gentleman can lay his hands upon a woman save in the way of kindness, no matter how much she needs a thrashing or he yearns to give her one.

“While as for giving a wife sustenance and raiment, believe me, that to be a good provider is one of the brightest jewels in the crown of a good husband. No matter what other charms and virtues a man may have, he is a poor makeshift of a husband if he cannot give his wife a comfortable living. And, on the other hand, no man is a total failure as a husband if he laps his wife in luxuries. Jewels, and motorcars, and fine houses, and fine clothes are a consolation prize that takes the curse off many a woman’s disappointment in marriage.

“Having, then, accorded your wife considerate treatment and given her a good home, the next step in being a good husband is to play fair with her on the money question. Get off on the right foot there and you will save yourself endless bickerings and prevent her from feeling a bitterness toward you that will grow and grow until it will kill out all of her affection for you. The first disillusion that many a bride gets is when she finds out that the prince of her dreams is a tightwad, who haggles with her over the market money and who is so stingy that he never gives her a penny of her own. There isn’t a woman in the world who is enough of a worm of the dust not to resent having to ask her husband for the money she knows she earns as a housewife. So go fifty-fifty with your wife on the money proposition. Give her as big an allowance as you can afford and be decent enough not to ask her what she does with it.

“The next item in being a good husband is to be affectionate to your wife. Don’t expect her to take it for granted that you still love her because you haven’t applied for a divorce from her. You handed her a fine and convincing line of love talk while you were courting her, and there is no excuse for your cutting it off and becoming as dumb as an oyster just as soon as you’ve got her. No normal woman can live without love and be happy. It is just as necessary to her well-being as food and drink, and if she is deprived of it she suffers all of the agonies of soul starvation, which are worse than those of the body. When you marry a woman you isolate her from the love-making of other men, and so you are in honor bound to provide her with an ample supply of soft talk yourself.

“Therefore, make it a rule of your life to give your wife at least one kiss every day that has in it some thrill of love and passion, and that isn’t flavored with ham and eggs like the perfunctory peck on the cheek or the back of the ear which is all most men hand their wives in the osculation line. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t neglect to pay your wife compliments. When she has on a new dress tell her how pretty she looks and how becoming it is, instead of grunting or demanding to know how much it costs. If you have eyes enough to see other women’s pretty clothes and intelligence enough to say the right things about them, why not about your wife’s, when it will please her to death and make her think what a wonderful man she has married?

“The next point in being a good husband consists in doing something actively to make your wife happy and showing a human interest in her. Many men think they have done their whole duty as husbands when they furnish their wives with food and shelter and plenty of money. I have heard men excuse themselves for never remembering an anniversary or giving their wives a little present by saying that they didn’t know what Mary or Sally wanted, and that they had charge accounts at the best jewelers and department stores and could buy themselves whatever they wanted.

“That kind of thing doesn’t make a woman happy. There isn’t a wife in the world who wouldn’t get more thrill out of a dollar string of blue beads that her husband bought because they matched her eyes than she would out of a pearl necklace that she bought herself on her wedding anniversary because her husband had forgotten they were ever married. It is the personal touch that counts with women. The sentiment. The knowledge that her husband is concerned about her, that he notices when she is tired, that he appreciates all that she does, that he tries to make her happy and wants to give her every pleasure that he can.

“If you want to be a good husband, son, remember to do the little things, and the big things will do themselves. Be affectionate, be kind, be appreciative, jolly her instead of finding fault with her. Be liberal in the use of flattery and take her to some place of amusement at least once a week, and she will thank God on her knees for having given you to her for a husband.”

XXXIX
GIVING CHILDREN ADVANTAGES

Among my acquaintances is a woman who is always bemoaning the fact that she cannot give her children “advantages.” She sheds barrels of tears over their not having the “advantages” that the children of the rich have. She beats upon her breast and laments that she cannot send her boys to college, and give them high-powered motorcars, and when she thinks of not being able to dress her daughters like fashion plates and send them off to summer and winter resorts, she melts down into a perfect pulp of self-pity. After listening to this wail for a number of years, I grew exasperated, and said to her:

“What are the advantages that you cannot give your children? Let us sit down and consider them dispassionately, and see if your children really are so unfortunate, and so handicapped in life as you think they are. Let us begin with your not being able to send your boys off to college. I grant you that we would all like to give our children every possible opportunity to acquire a good education. But not all knowledge comes put up in school-book packages. Furthermore, the degree a man takes who graduates from the University of Hard Knocks has a lot of practical, available information, and a working knowledge of life that is worth a bushel of M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s, and that it will take the college graduate ten or fifteen years to acquire. Many of the best-informed, best-read men that I know never saw the inside of a college. In these days of cheap books, and magazines, and newspapers, if a man wants an education he will get it.

“Nor is the lack of a college education any bar to success. The men who are running things in America to-day spent their formative years, from 18 to 24, in learning about mines, and railroads, and stores, and banking, instead of being grounded in Greek and Latin. And they are hiring college graduates to work for them. Moreover, while you can lead a boy to the Pierian spring, you cannot make him drink from it, and you know well enough that the great majority of boys who are sent off to college idle away their time, and come back with nothing but a college yell, the latest thing in Klassy Kut Kollege Klothes, and a maddening air of superiority. So comfort yourself with the knowledge that if your son has it in him to take an education he will get it. If he yearns for culture he will acquire it, but if he is just a boy who has good hard horse sense, and is not intellectual, the sooner he gets to work after his high-school days the better for him. Of course, mother-like, you want your children to have everything that multimillionaires have, but in your heart you must know that money is a curse to a boy instead of a blessing. To begin with, wealth paralyzes ambition. We are all poor, weak creatures who take the line of least resistance, and when we don’t have to do things we become slackers. We have to have necessity to spur us on to achievement.

“Call over the roll of the rich men of to-day, of the men who sit in high places, from the President down, of the men who are famous inventors, and writers, and artists. They were almost all poor boys. There is scarcely the name of a millionaire’s son in the whole list. And riches lead a boy into temptation from which the poor boy is safe. The boy who has to work for his daily bread has his mind and his hands occupied. He has something interesting and exciting always to do. The idle rich boy must make his own diversions, and find some way of killing time, and he does it only too often by the booze and the gambling route, and in the company of wild women. For adventuresses and grafters fasten themselves like leeches on the man with a fat pocketbook. There is nothing like lacking the price as a first aid to virtue.

“As for not being able to give your girls advantages, do you really think it is any advantage to a girl to be brought up to be nothing but a fashion plate, to have no duties and responsibilities, to have no object in life except amusing herself and to be taught merely to be a waster and a spender? Do you think that the woman who has a dozen homes in this country and Europe, between which she vibrates with no more local attachments than a transient guest has in a hotel, gets the pleasure out of them that the woman does out of her little bungalow, whose every plank has been paid for by some sacrifice and where every chair and plate is the result of weeks of saving and planning? Do you think the girl who buys herself a European title is as happy with the roué husband she has purchased as the girl who marries some clean, honest young chap she loves and works up with him to prosperity? Do you think that the woman who bears children and then turns them over to nurses and governesses gets the benediction out of motherhood that the woman does who cradles her children on her breast and rears them up at her knee?

“You lament that you cannot give your daughters the chance to make fine marriages. Why, the working girl has ten times as good chance to make a good marriage as the society girl has, because she is thrown with more men. She works side by side with the go-getters and the coming men, and she has the pick of them all. So,” I said to my lachrymose friend, “stop whining because you aren’t rich and can’t give your children ‘advantages.’ You are giving them the necessity of standing on their own feet and fighting their own battles, of developing all that is best in them, and that is the greatest advantage that you could possibly give them.”

XL
SELL YOURSELF TO YOUR CHILDREN

Did you ever contemplate trying to “sell” your children, as the advertising experts say, the things you wish them to be and do? Did you ever try selling them yourself? Of course, the old idea is that the proper way to rear children is by forcing on them a system of do’s and don’ts. We tell our children that they must do this, and they mustn’t do that. We try to coerce them along the straight and narrow road because that is the proper path for them to travel, but we never take the trouble to artfully entice them into it and make them think that they have chosen it of their own free wills.

We want our children to love us, to admire us, to consider us their best friends; but we expect them to do this because we believe it the duty of children to honor their parents. Not ten fathers and mothers in a thousand ever deliberately try to make themselves attractive to their children or win their confidence. Perhaps this is why there are so many boys and girls hurtling down the broad highway to destruction; why parental influence amounts to so little, and why the average child feels that it has less in common with its own father and mother than it has with any other man and woman it knows.

We have just begun to realize that propaganda is one of the greatest and most insidious forces on earth. We have seen it lift men up to the skies and make gods of them, then turn and pull them down, and trample them into the dust. We have seen it exalt a nation into sainthood and turn it into a howling mob, crying for blood. And if it can thus sway and move grown-up people, what a weapon it is to use upon the plastic mind of a child! This being the case, why should we not “sell” our children the ideals we wish them to have? Why should we not feed them on the right propaganda from their cradle up? Why should we not advertise the good things of life until we make them so alluring that the child will want them?

Why should we not sell righteousness to our children? It is one thing to preach and nag at them about drink, and gambling, and associating with bad men and women until you bore them to tears and make them wonder what is the fascination of the evil that they are so warned against. And it is another thing to make clean living the symbol of health, and strength, and length of days; the respect of one’s fellow men and, above all, the thing that sets one right with one’s own soul.

Why not sell our children education? We scourge them to school, which most of them regard as a place of penance, and where, dull and bored, they sit in stolid indifference, while the dull and bored teachers go through the perfunctory routine of hearing them recite lessons in which they do not pretend to take the slightest interest. But suppose we could really sell these children the idea of education? Suppose we could get them as interested in history as they are in stories of adventure? Suppose we could make them see that spelling and arithmetic are not tasks; that they are the tools with which they will work when they get their first jobs as stenographers and bookkeepers, and that the better they spell and the quicker they are at figures the bigger their pay envelopes will be! Suppose we could make them see that knowledge is power, and that whether they stay at the foot of the ladder or climb to the top is going to depend on how well their brains are trained! Why, if we could make children see the advantages of an education we would not have to force them to go to school. They would be eager and anxious to go.

Suppose we sold our children good manners. We are always correcting Johnny at the table about the way he eats, and he is so used to our don’ts about walking in front of people and keeping his hat on that he has long since ceased to listen when we speak. But suppose, from his earliest infancy, Johnny had heard boors ridiculed, and knife swallowers, and cup cuddlers, and audible soup-eaters held up to scorn as figures of fun. Do you not know that Johnny would as soon think of committing murder as one of these offenses? And suppose Johnny has had it impressed on him by precept and example that good manners are a letter of credit that is honored the world over; that they will take you farther than anything else on earth. Don’t you know that Johnny would be incapable of loutishness, because good manners had simply been bred into him?

Why should we not sell our children industry and thrift? Propaganda again. You can make work the most thrilling of all games. You can make a child feel that his job is of great importance. You can form in childhood an unbreakable habit of industry. You can teach the child how to deny itself little things in order to save the money for big things. You can make it feel the independence of having its own little bank account. You can set a goal before it and light the fires of ambition in its soul.

Finally, why not sell yourself to your children? Why not make as much effort to ingratiate yourself with your children as you would with a stranger? Why not try to impress your children with your ability, your wisdom, your up-to-dateness, as you would any man or woman with whom you are trying to do business? If parents could only convince their children that they are not back-numbers and incarnate killjoys it would do more than any other one thing to improve the family relationship. Believe me, it pays to advertise—especially with your children.

XLI
TAKING HUSBANDS “AS IS”

I wish that I could make every young girl who gets married a present of a handsomely framed motto to hang on the wall above the mirror of her dressing table, where she would be compelled to see it every time she put on or took off her complexion, or repaired the Cupid’s bow of her lips. On this motto in gorgeously illumined letters would be these sapient words of Grover Cleveland: “It is a condition and not a theory that confronts you.” I can think of no other advice in the world that would be such a lamp to guide the feet of any young woman who is starting to blunder down the rough road of matrimony, as this cold, hard, unimaginative assertion of a simple fact. It brushes away with one gesture of common sense all the dreams and romances and fairy tales of courtship, and leaves a woman facing the reality of matrimony, which is never as she thought it would be. It just is as it is.

If women would only abandon their theories about what matrimony should be, and how husbands should act, and deal with them as they are, it would save floods of tears, innumerable broken hearts, hundreds of cases of nervous prostration, and put the divorce courts out of business. Furthermore, that women are mostly right in their contentions, and have logic and justice on their side, doesn’t alter this aspect of the situation at all. For instance, woman’s perpetual grievance against her husband is his indifference. She wails out that he inveigled her into matrimony under false pretenses because from the ardor with which he wooed her, he led her to believe and expect that he would be an eternal lover and would spend a large part of his time telling her how beautiful and wonderful she was, and how he adored her. Instead of making good on this antenuptial propaganda, however, he stopped all of his love-making at the altar with a suddenness that jarred her wisdom teeth loose, and in place of being a ladylove, she finds herself merely a household convenience.

Millions of women make themselves miserable because their husbands never make love to them, never pay them a compliment, never give them any sign of appreciation, never take them to any place of amusement, never give any indication that they still care for them and want them to be happy. These suffering sisters could save themselves nearly all of their woe if they would just throw their rosy dreams of how a husband should treat a wife into the discard, and accept the truth that very few men are sentimentalists. Most of them feel like fools when they are love-making, and so they get the ordeal over with as quickly as possible. They consider that when a man marries a woman, and undertakes her board bill and shopping ticket, that he has given a proof of devotion strong enough to draw money on at the bank, and there is no use in saying anything more about it. Also they feel that the fact that they selected the women they did for wives showed that they admired them above all other women, so why harp on that string? And, of course, they want their wives to be happy. What else do they toil for except to doll their wives up, and give them cars and houses and trips to Palm Beach?

So the wife may be very happy and contented who has philosophy enough to take her husband as he is, good, kind and generous, even if he is a dumb lover, apparently more interested in his business than he is in her. She realizes that he says it with checks instead of with flowery phrases, and that if she is starved emotionally she is sure of her daily roast beef and potatoes. Then there is the matter of adjustment between a man and a woman. Every bride dreams an impossible dream of a husband who is chilled steel to all the balance of the world, but putty in her hands. Experience blows this fair dream to the ends of the earth, and she finds that she can no more alter her husband’s habits and prejudices than she can the laws of the Medes and the Persians. He has his ways, and she can either give in to them or fight over them. He has his set opinions, and she can sidestep them or fight with him about them.

She can either use tact and diplomacy in handling him, or else be in a perpetual quarrel with him, and she protests that this isn’t fair or just. She says that it is as much his place to give in to her as it is hers to give in to him. That it is just as much his business to deal subtly with her, as it is her business to deal subtly with him. Of course, the woman is right, but being right doesn’t help her a bit in getting along with her husband. It is a condition and not a theory that confronts her. If any harmonious relations exist between her and her husband, she has to furnish the harmony. If there is any adapting, it is the wife who must do the adapting.

Women likewise complain that it is unjust that they should have to do practically all of the work of making a happy home. They say that it is just as much a man’s business to be a little ray of sunshine in the home as it is a woman’s; that it is just as much up to a husband to wear the smile that won’t come off as it is the wife’s. They say that there is no more reason why they should read up on subjects that interest their husbands, so as to be able to hand out a good line of conversation, than why their husbands shouldn’t read up on fashion journals so as to be able to discuss intelligently with them the length of skirts and the latest hair bob. True. But again it is the condition and not the theory of matrimony that confronts them, and unless the wife makes the happy home it isn’t made. It is when women forget what matrimony should be, and deal with it as it is, that they make a success of it.

XLII
BEING A GOOD WIFE

“I want to be a good wife, the kind of a wife like that lady in the Bible whose price was above rubies,” said a little bride to me the other day. “What shall I do to be a real helpmeet to my husband?”

“Well, my dear,” I replied, “there are three general counts on which every wife must make good in order to help her husband, and then the job becomes the work of an expert, and varies according to the temperament of the man. To begin with, every woman who is an asset instead of a total loss to her husband, must make him a comfortable home and feed him properly. When a man marries, he practically turns over his stomach and his nerves and his brains to his wife’s care, and she can keep him at the peak of efficiency by giving him a quiet, restful place to come to at night, and a good dinner to eat, or she can sabotage the whole works by throwing in quarrels and heavy biscuit and tough meat.

“There is practically no limit to the amount of work a man can do whose wife takes care of him, and who has a happy home life. The men who break down with nervous prostration are the men who, after the struggle and anxiety and worries of a business day, go home to strife and wrangles and recriminations and nagging and to food that would kill an ostrich. No nerves and no digestion will stand it. A breakfast of flabby cakes and muddy coffee, that make him take a dyspeptic and despairing view of things, and see the world through blue spectacles, has made many a man turn down a good proposition that would have carried him on to fame and fortune. A spat with his wife that left his nerves on edge, and his soul filled with bitterness, has made many a man quarrel with his partner and insult his best client or customer.

“So, my dear, if you want to help your husband succeed, you must begin by making him a home wherein his tired body and frazzled nerves may refresh themselves, so that he may go forth with new strength to battle with the world. You must make him happy, for there is nothing that happy people may not achieve. The next item is to keep on cutting bait. Don’t deceive yourself into thinking that because you have captured your man he will stay captive. It is a job that has to be done over again every morning.

“You know the arts and wiles with which you lured him into matrimony. You recall the pretty dresses you wore, the glad, sweet smile with which you met him. The pleasure you showed you took in his society. A man doesn’t put on blinders when he gets married. He still has an eye out for a pretty woman in a gay frock, and he likes to feel that his wife still cares enough for him to want to make herself attractive to him and that his coming home is the big event of the day to her.

“Item three in being a good wife is to be a loving wife. Women are always talking about being heart-hungry and seem to think that it is an exclusively feminine complaint, but there are just as many men starving for affection as there are women. Don’t expect your husband to take it for granted that you still love him because you haven’t applied for a divorce. Tell him so. Give him a kiss now and then that isn’t just a peck on the cheek. But love with discretion. Don’t smother your husband with affection. Don’t surfeit him on it. Keep your love as a sweetener for matrimony. Don’t make it the whole diet. Remember that the most-loved husband in the world said: ‘Feed me with apples, stay me with flagons, for I am SICK of love.’

“The fourth item in being a good wife is not to expect the impossible of your husband. Don’t demand that he be a demigod. Accept him as a poor, faulty human being, even as you are. Don’t have hysterics every time he topples off of the pedestal on which you have placed him. Help him up, dust him off and give him a seat beside you. Humor him in his funny little ways. Sidestep his little prejudices. Don’t argue with him when your opinions clash. Laugh at his blunders and sympathize with him when he makes mistakes, and he will make you his confidant and tell you the truth, which is the finest tribute that any man ever pays his wife.

“Item five in being a good wife is to be appreciative. When the average man gets married he sells himself into bondage to his family. The remainder of his life he spends toiling to keep his wife and children soft and safe. And whether all this work and sacrifice is worth the price and is a glorious reward depends altogether on his wife’s attitude. If she takes it as nothing but her due, it is slavery. But if she lets him see every day in every way that she thinks that he is the finest and noblest man that ever lived, and that no be-medaled warrior has anything on him in heroism, it makes it all worth while and causes him to feel that being a husband and father is the finest career on earth.

“Item six in being a good wife is to keep yourself good-natured. Tho you have all other virtues, yet are a high-tempered virago or a nagger, you will be a failure as a wife and your husband will curse the day he married you.

“Item seven is to be a good sport. To take the bad with the good of matrimony without whining. Not to welch on your part of the work and sacrifices. To be willing to go where your husband’s fortunes call him. To fight the battle with him shoulder to shoulder and never to give up the ship.

“The next way to help your husband is by keeping yourself cheerful and optimistic. Nothing breaks down a man’s morale so quickly as having a wife who is whining and complaining, who reproaches him with not making as much money as other men do, and who lets him see that she does not believe in him. Now we can only do the things we think we can do, and when we kill a man’s faith in himself we have slain his ability to succeed. Ninety-nine husbands out of a hundred live up to their wives’ expectations of them. If their wives are always knocking them and discouraging them and wet-blanketing their every plan and prophesying failure, they fail. But if their wives are cheerful and optimistic; if they encourage them; if they believe in them, and make them believe in themselves, they succeed. They simply have to make good because their wives expect it. Most wives write their husbands’ price tags. Price yours high, and your husband will deliver the goods.

“The next point in being a good wife is for the wife deliberately to make herself her husband’s best friend. That means that you must interest yourself in whatever interests him. First and foremost, you must take an interest in his business. Practically all men like to talk shop, but they can’t do it to women who yawn in their faces and who never take the trouble to learn the technique of the business out of which they get their living. A woman can help her husband not only by taking an interest in his business, but by making friends for him. Many a man is advertised into success by his charming wife, and many a man is bankrupted by his disagreeable and ill-mannered spouse. A woman can help her husband by using a little common sense in her attitude toward his business, and by being willing to make the sacrifices necessary to his success.

“The woman who always speaks of her husband’s office as ‘that old office,’ and who resents his interest in his business and the time he devotes to it; the woman who will not let her husband leave a poor job with no future to it, to take a better one in which he could make his fortune, because it would take her away from mother and the girls and Main Street; the doctors’ and dentists’ wives who are jealous of their husbands’ patients, and the lawyer’s wife who blabs, are all first aids to their husbands’ failure. Only a man of superhuman talent can succeed against the handicap of such a wife.

“Then come the two specific ways in which a wife can help her husband, and which depend on the individual man. Some men have talent, but lack backbone. They are brilliant but weak. They get easily discouraged and need to be bucked up and flattered and admired continually. They are prone to give up, and they need a wife who will hold them to their purpose when they falter and waver. A wife can help this type of man best by being a little hard and very ambitious, by bracing him up with her own strength and literally pushing him on to success. The clinging vine, helpless sort of women bring out the best that is in other men. If their wives could stand on their own feet, their husbands would let them do it, but because their wives can do nothing but hang around their necks, they feel that they must fight to the death for them.

“This is the reason that for the wife to be thrifty and saving is not always the best way to help a man. Because many a man has had to hustle to meet the demands of an extravagant wife he has made the effort that turned him into a millionaire.

“But mostly, my dear, if you want to help your husband, just love him enough. Perhaps that is the best way of all.”

XLIII
INVALIDISM A GRAFT

Do you ever think that it is dishonest to be sick when you might be well? It is just plain stealing. And it is the most despicable form of petty larceny, because it is robbing those who love you, and trust you and who are defenseless against you. They cannot lock up their sympathies, their peace of mind, their personal service, their money, safely away from your pilfering. Of course, there are many people who are really ill. Through no fault of their own, they are smitten by some terrible disease, and they deserve all that we can give of pity and help as they go stumbling down the agonized way to the grave.

These words are not for them, but for that multitude of men and women with whom sickness is merely a graft, a camouflage for selfishness, and a blanket excuse with which they cover up all their sins of omission and commission, and that furnishes them a perfect alibi for doing everything they want to do, and leaving undone those things which they do not wish to do.

Ninety per cent of all the sickness in the world is voluntary, or at least comes through contributory negligence. People are sick because they are not willing to make the sacrifices to keep well.

And curiously enough they justify themselves by claiming that their own health is a personal matter. “If I make myself sick, I am the one who has to suffer,” they say. If this were true, far be it from the rest of us to interfere with their pleasures. But it isn’t true. No man or woman is sick to himself or herself alone. We have to listen to their groans. We have to minister to them. We have to do their work. We have to pay their doctor’s bills. We have to put up with their irritability and unreason because sickness is supposed to give people carte blanche to do and say all the things that well people do not dare to do. When ill health is an act of God, as shipping manifests say, and therefore beyond our control, it is one thing. When it is the result of weak self-indulgence it is another thing. Our sympathies and our assistance go out to the victim of tuberculosis or cancer, but we have nothing but contempt for the glutton who keeps himself sick from overeating.

In every business house where women are employed there is such a large percentage of them absent from work on account of sickness, especially during the winter, that the question is often raised whether the delicate feminine constitution can stand the strain of commercial life. Stuff and nonsense! It isn’t the work that is hurting the girls. It is the way they dress and live.

They feel that they have a perfect right to risk bad colds and pneumonia by coming to work on rainy, sloppy, sleety days in paper-soled satin pumps and chiffon stockings, and with not enough clothes on to keep an icicle warm. They consider it their own affair if they prefer to spend their money on an imported hat instead of on nourishing food. They think if they come to the office with a nervous headache that makes them blind and stupid with pain, and was brought on by too many nights of successive jazzing, it is a matter between them and the aspirin bottle alone. But it isn’t. They are not giving their employers a square deal. They are not giving them the services they pay for. They are upsetting the routine of the office, and laying the burden of their work on the shoulders of other people.

Look at the invalid wives you know! Dozens of them who have brought nervous prostration on themselves by overwork, or too many clubs and causes, or too much society. Don’t we all know women who go on orgies of housecleaning, or dressmaking, though they know perfectly well that every such debauch is going to end up in a spell of sickness which will call for doctors and trained nurses? Don’t we know women who wear themselves to tatters over church fairs and club campaigns? Don’t we know women who play bridge every day until they are so nervous that they become unbearable at home and their husbands have to send them off to sanatoriums to get a little peace and rest themselves? We do.

We marvel that these women never stop to consider how they are defrauding their families. They never consider what a wickedly dishonest thing it is to deprive a husband and children of a healthy, strong wife and mother, and give them a neurotic, irritable, cross, nerve-wrecked creature who makes the home about as cheerful as a grave-yard, and in which they have always to walk softly and speak in whispers for fear of disturbing the lady who has just gone to bed with a neuralgia headache.

Then there is the large army of women who enjoy poor health, who are professional invalids for the simple reason that they are too lazy and indolent to make the effort to be well. They are quitters who literally take life lying down. They cultivate small ailments. They acquire the sanatorium habit, and they expect to be pitied and babied instead of being ostracized as dishonest grafters who snatch the very bread out of the mouths of their families to pay their unnecessary doctor’s bills. We all know dozens of these women who suffer from imaginary complaints, and we have seen many of them cured by their husband’s death, when they had to quit being sick, and go to work and support themselves.

That is why I say that it is dishonest to be sick when you might be well.

XLIV
SELFISHNESS MADE TO ORDER

“My daughter is so selfish toward me,” wailed a mother to me the other day, “she never considers my comfort or happiness in any way whatever. Since the day she was born I have never had a thought except for her. I have given her the best of everything. I have worn old clothes in order that she might have fine new ones. I have done without the things I wanted that she might indulge her every desire. I have gone to the places that she wished to go to, instead of the places where I wished to go. I have cooked and sewed and waited upon her like a slave, but instead of appreciating all that I have done for her she takes it as a matter of course. She thinks any old cast-off is good enough for mother and never dreams of doing anything she doesn’t want to do for my pleasure. And that is my reward for all the sacrifices I have made for her!”

“Say rather that, as the result of all the sacrifices that you have made for your daughter,” I replied, “your girl is just exactly what you have made her. You have put in twenty-two years of conscientious work in erecting a monument of selfishness, and you have no right to complain. You wouldn’t build a house of mud and garbage cans and expect it to be a white marble palace. How, then, can you expect to build up a child’s character with all the meanest characteristics of human nature and expect it to be fine and noble? Impossible. And that is the sort of miracle that you parents expect from your children when you demand that they shall be something totally different from the thing into which you have made them.

“When your daughter was born, she was as plastic as clay in your hands. It was your privilege to mold her into any shape you pleased. You could have taught her to be unselfish, to be considerate, to think of other people, to love and honor and respect you. Instead of that, from her first conscious moment, you taught her to despise you, to think you of no account and not worth considering. You taught her to think only of herself, of her own pleasures and desires, and to get what she wanted at any cost to others. Now you whine because your teaching has borne fruit. You are unjust and unreasonable. What we sow, we reap inevitably. If you make yourself a doormat before your children, they will walk over you and kick you about, because they naturally think that you know where you belong in the household and have taken your proper place.

“They would just as naturally have looked up to you if you had placed yourself on a pedestal above them and demanded to be worshiped. Children don’t reason about their parents. They just accept them as they are and hold them cheap, or dear, according to the way the mother and father value themselves. I have no tears to shed over the sorrows of mothers who have selfish and ungrateful daughters, because every time it is the mother’s own fault. She is to blame, not the girl.

“If she had spent part of the clothes money on getting herself some pretty frocks, instead of lavishing it all on daughter, daughter would be proud of mother instead of being ashamed of her. If she had made daughter help with the housework and the sewing, instead of slaving over the cookstove and the sewing machine so that daughter might go free, daughter would think about saving mother and doing things for her. If she had asserted her rights to her own personal tastes and pleasures, instead of letting daughter’s tastes and pleasures rule the household, daughter would show her some consideration and remember mother’s likes and dislikes, and cater to them. There are mothers who are queens in their families, just as there are mothers who are nothing but the maid-of-all-work in their homes, and it rests with every mother to decide which she will be. It is the queen mothers who are loved and appreciated, and who have dutiful, unselfish children. The drudge mother gets only the wages of the drudge from her children.

“In reality, the mother who rears her children up to be monsters of selfishness has no right to expect appreciation and gratitude from them because she has done them as ill a turn as one human being can do another. She has warped their characters. She has developed in them traits that mar their happiness and are a handicap to success. She has made them egotists, and they are never satisfied and continually at variance with those about them. In particular is selfishness a blight upon a woman’s life, for the selfish woman finds it almost impossible to make the sacrifices that wifehood and motherhood demand of her. One of the main reasons why divorce is so prevalent is because when so many selfish girls find that they can’t treat their husbands as they did their mothers, they throw up their hands and quit.

“And so,” I said to the mother of the selfish daughter, “you are unfair to your daughter. Don’t blame her for being what you made her. What else could you expect?”

XLV
SELF-CONTROL

If I were to go to a mother who was cradling her babe on her breast, and tell her that I knew a magic formula by which she could insure power, and prosperity, and happiness to her child, she would impoverish herself to purchase this knowledge from me, and fall on her knees and bless me for having given it to her.

Yet I know just such a bit of white magic. In her secret soul every mother herself knows it, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred she is either too weak or too lazy to use it.

This charm that would have changed all life for innumerable people; that would have kept men out of prisons, and women out of brothels; that would have turned paupers into rich men; made the unsuccessful successful and stopped the wheels of the divorce court—consists simply in teaching children self-control.

Almost every misfortune under which humanity suffers goes straight back to that. There is hardly a derelict in the world who cannot say: “I would not be what I am if my mother had taught me to control myself.”

For it is lack of self-control that is at the bottom of most of our sins of omission and commission.

Look at the murderer going to the death chair. Not once in a thousand times is he a cold-blooded murderer; but he was a high-tempered child whose mother never taught him to control himself. There came a day when something irritated him more than usual and, aflame with anger, he took a fellow creature’s life. It is the supreme manifestation of the same spirit that made him kick the chair against which he stumbled as a child and beat with impotent little fists all who thwarted him.

Look at the drunkard wallowing in the gutter. He is there because his mother never taught him to control his appetites. He is the logical outgrowth of the greedy little boy who was permitted to gorge himself on cake and candy until it made him ill.

Look at the poor, shabby, out-at-elbows man who has drifted from job to job all his life, and has never been able to make a decent support for himself and his family. He is his mother’s handiwork. She put the curse of incompetence on him when she let him give up every undertaking the moment he struck the hard sledding in it.

He changed from one school to another because the lessons were too difficult, or the teacher was too strict. When he started to work, he left one place because the hours were too long, another because his boss was too exacting. He tried a dozen different occupations that he left because he found they had unpleasant features and involved doing uncongenial tasks. He is a down-and-outer because his mother never taught him the self-control that makes a man set his teeth and go through with the business to which he has put his hand.

Look at the girls who go astray. Not one of “the sorrowful sisterhood” as the Japanese pitifully call them, but who is what she is because her mother did not teach her self-control. Did the girl sin because she was so weak and so in love with some vicious libertine that she listened to her heart instead of her head? Her mother could have saved her from a fate worse than death if she had taught her to control her emotions, instead of being ruled by them.

Did the girl sell her soul for fine clothes, and good times? Again the mother’s fault for not teaching the girl self-control, and to do without the things that she could not honestly get.

Look at the poor old people who are dependent on their children, or the grudging charity of relatives and friends. In how many cases is their unhappy fate simply the result of their lack of self-control! They have had their chance of fortune. As long as the man was able to work he made plenty of money, and they lived luxuriously, but they spent everything as they went along. They laid up nothing for their rainy day, and when it came, it found them paupers and parasites. The difference between dependence and independence, between comfort and misery in your old age depends upon how much self-control you have had in your youth.

Look at the ever increasing number of divorces. Look at the forlorn half-orphan children, and broken up homes. Look at the unhappy married couples you know. What is the real cause of all this domestic trouble? Merely that mothers do not teach their children self-control. They raise up spoiled, selfish daughters who never consider a thing in life but their own pleasure.

They raised up spoiled, selfish sons who have never considered another human being but themselves. These two, with undisciplined wills, unrestrained tempers, undirected impulses, marry each other, and they fight like cats and dogs. Observation shows that either a husband or a wife who controls himself or herself can save almost any marriage, and it takes no prophet to foretell that mothers could insure their children’s domestic happiness by teaching them iron bound self-control.

You can teach a baby three weeks old self-control by refusing to give it the thing it howls for. Say to the toddler that falls and bumps its nose, “Mother’s brave boy doesn’t cry,” and it will bite back the sobs. It will yell the roof off if you pity it. A child of three will be obedient, cheerful, respectful of the rights of others, or he will be a little demon, according to the way his mother has brought him up.

If she has taught him self-control, she has given him the magic that works all the miracles of life, and if she hasn’t, she has done him the greatest wrong that any human being can possibly do to another human being.

XLVI
OLD FATHERS AND NEW DAUGHTERS

“O dear Miss Dix,” wails a little flapper, “won’t you please help me? Won’t you please try to make my father understand that I must do as people do now, instead of doing the way that he did when he was young? I’ve got the best daddy in the world, and I love him with all my heart; but he is ruining my life trying to make me the sort of girl that he says mother was. And I’m not mother. I am myself, and I don’t live thirty years ago. I live now, and I have to be a model girl of now or else a back-number at whom nobody will look and whom nobody wants. Father says he is an old-fashioned father, and he is trying to make me an old-fashioned girl. I never have any up-to-the-minute clothes because mother didn’t wear short skirts and no corsets and bob her hair. I can’t go joy-riding with a crowd because they didn’t have automobiles when father was young. I have to be home at 11 o’clock when I go out in the evening because he says that he never stayed out late when he was young.

“I can’t dance because father didn’t jazz and he doesn’t think the modern dances respectable. He won’t let me read any of the six best sellers because he doesn’t approve of modern literature, and he makes me read old-fashioned books that I almost yawn my head off over. And he just simply loathes all the boys who come to see me. Calls them sapheads, and he wonders why I want to waste my time talking nonsense with little jellybeans such as they are. He says it is just appalling to see how youth has deteriorated since his day, and that when he was young the boys and girls were all serious-minded young people, who cared only for rational amusements, and that instead of chasing around to cabarets they spent the evening at home in intelligent conversation.

“I suppose we young ones are a poor lot compared to what our parents were; but such as we are, we are. In Rome you have to do as the Romans do or else you get left. I want to play with the other girls and boys, but I can’t unless I play the way they do. My father is always talking about home being woman’s proper sphere, and wifehood and motherhood being a woman’s noblest career. But how am I to get married if I am never permitted to have any dates with boys? You might just as well lock a girl up in a stone cell and throw away the key as not to let her do what the other girls are doing. There are too many pretty girls, with lots of fun and pep in them, that the boys can run around with, for them to take the trouble to hunt up one that is laid up on the shelf and labeled ‘old-fashioned.’ And when I tell my father this he gets angry and I cry, and I don’t know what to do because I don’t want to disobey him and I don’t want to waste my youth sticking around at home and having no pleasure.”

“Alas, my dear,” I said, “your father is trying to foist his ideals on you, just as his father tried to foist his ideals on him. Each generation tries to do it and each makes dark prophecies about what the present generation is coming to. Your grandfather thought bustles just as dreadful as your father thinks rolled stockings are. Your grandfather disapproved of side-bar buggies just as much as your father does of automobiles. Your grandfather considered the waltz just as indecent as your father does shimmying. Your grandfather thought your father should only read Shakespeare and Richardson, and considered Dickens frivolous, just as your father thinks you ought to read Dickens instead of ‘The Sheik.’ And your grandfather told your father how superior the young men of his day were, and how they spent their time in improving their minds and always went to bed with the chickens, and how they doted on intellectual conversation, just as his father told him and great-great-great-great-grandfather told his son.

“And it is all stuff and nonsense. Not a word of it has ever been true. Each succeeding generation of young people have been pleasure-loving and laughter-loving and foolish, and have danced and played and skylarked. And all the difference is that their games have taken on different phases in different ages. It is a pity that fathers and mothers cannot remember this. If they did and would look on with sympathy and understanding, they could keep close enough to their children to know what they are doing and to stretch out a hand and hold them steady when they start to go wild, and to snatch them back when they get too near to the edge of the pit. For youth will be served. Youth must have its fling. High spirits must find a vent. Suppress these with the heavy hand of authority and something blows up.

“Lock a girl in her room, and she will climb out of the window. Forbid her to see boys at home, and she will meet them on the street. Refuse to let her go to nice dances, and she will slip away to low dance halls. The wildest and most reckless girls are invariably those with the strictest parents. The young people of to-day live in the world of to-day and must do as they do to-day. Parents must recognize that and deal with them on that platform if they wish to do their duty by their children.”

XLVII
LOSING A WIFE’S LOVE

One of the most curious superstitions in the world is the childlike belief that men have in the indestructibility of women’s love. They visualize the feminine heart as a sort of perpetual-motion machine that, once they press the button and set it to work, goes on automatically pumping up affection for them as long as they live, and they think that nothing they do or say ever interferes with its functioning. In a word, they believe that if a man wins a woman’s love it is his for keeps. He can’t lose it or mislay it. The poor thing has no choice but to go on adoring him to the end, because she is built that way. It is a comfortable and consoling theory, and men take liberties with it, but the trouble is that it isn’t true. In reality, women are just as fickle as men are, and just as few women as men are capable of a deep and abiding love. Women’s fancies are just as unstable as men’s. They are just as much lured by a handsome face and fall as easily for a smooth line of soft talk. And there are just as many wives who get tired of their husbands as there are husbands who are weary of their wives.

The only difference between the sexes in the matter is that women face the situation, while men shut their eyes to it and refuse to recognize that it exists. Every woman knows that because a man was in love with her when he married her is no indication that he is going to remain in love with her to the end of the chapter. She knows that if she keeps her husband’s affection she has to be up and doing, and on the job. That is why there are millions of women undergoing all the agonies of slow starvation trying to maintain a girlish figure; why millions are boiled alive and thumped and scalped in beauty parlors, and why the nation spends more a year for face paint than it does for house paint, and why, wherever we go, we see fat, middle-aged, bread-and-butter wives attempting to look like flappers and acquire the technique of the vamp in order to keep their husbands nailed to their own firesides.

Apparently, however, it never occurs to a man that there is the slightest necessity to make any effort to keep his wife fascinated and to prevent her eyes from roaming around in search of a sheik. He may be bay-windowed and bald, but if he reduces it is only on his doctor’s orders, and not because he wants to look boyish to his wife. And he never buys a toupee until after he becomes a widower and begins to take notice again. The idea that his wife might cease to love him actually never crosses the average man’s mind. He is convinced that she couldn’t do it. It is some peculiarity of the feminine constitution that makes a woman go on loving what has become unlovable. Now, with a man it is different, of course. He realizes that he couldn’t stay very long in love with a woman who was slouchy, and sloppy, and untidy looking, who came to breakfast in a dirty kimono and run down at the heel slippers. Nor would he take much interest in kissing a cheek smeared with cold cream.

But he doesn’t see why his wife shouldn’t still regard him as a romantic figure when he goes around in a soiled shirt and a rumpled collar, with grease spots on his coat and trousers that bag at the knees, and offers to her lips a countenance with a two days’ stubble of beard on it.

A man knows well enough that, as far as he is concerned, the only way to keep the love fires burning is to keep piling the fuel on it and pouring over it the oil of flattery and praise. But he thinks that you don’t have to put any more fuel on the fire of a woman’s heart, because it is a flame that miraculously replenishes itself. So after he marries he never bothers to show her any attention, or to pay her any compliments, or to tell her that he loves her, or give any indication that he regards her as anything but a piece of useful household furniture. If any woman ever treated him that way his affection would mighty soon starve to death, but he never has the slightest apprehension that his wife’s love will perish on the same meager rations.

There are men who abuse their wives, who swear at them, and curse them, and speak to them as if they were dogs. There are men whose wives live in trembling fear of their tempers. There are men who are stingy and who do not give to their wives, who spend their lives slaving for them, the poorest wage of an ill-paid servant. Yet these men go on believing that their wives still love them because they loved them in the days of courtship, when they were handsome, gallant, and neat, and attractive, and loving, and flattering, and generous, and considerate swains.

Such men befool themselves by thinking that they cannot kill a woman’s love. Never was there a greater mistake. A woman’s love is as delicate and as fragile a thing as a flower that you can crush with a finger. And it takes never-ending skill, and care, and cherishing to keep it alive. You can kill it with disgust. You can kill it with unkindness. You can kill it with injustice. You can kill it with neglect, and it would surprise many a man who still believes that his wife loves him in spite of the way he has treated her, in spite of his indifference to her, to know that her love for him has been dead so long that she has almost forgotten that she ever cared for him at all.

So I warn you, Mr. Man, not to put any faith in the theory that you can’t kill a woman’s love. Women are like men; they only love the lovable. And if you wish to retain your wife’s affections, you have got to continue after marriage the same tactics you used in winning her.

XLVIII
THE LURE OF THE MARRIED MAN

A man wants to know why married men have such a fascination for girls, and wherein a benedict’s wooing differs from that of a bachelor. The first part of this double-barreled question was answered by Eve in the Garden of Eden, and every girl takes after her greatest grandmother. Married men are forbidden fruit, and that alone whets the appetite of the foolish little Evelyns for them, and makes them seem the prize pippins of the whole matrimonial orchard. The thing that a woman cannot have, that she has no right to have, and especially the thing that some other woman possesses, is always the thing that she wants most. If you have ever watched women fight over a commonplace and unattractive article on a bargain table, where each was determined to have it just because the others desired it, you have the psychological explanation of why a girl falls for a married man that she wouldn’t look at if he were single.

Also, women are the adventurous sex. They love to play with danger as a child plays with fire, and a large part of the lure of the married man consists in the fact that a girl knows that when she has an affair with one, she is risking every shred of her reputation, and gambling with her happiness, and that any minute she may be cited as a corespondent, and dragged into the slime of the divorce courts.

Also, the average girl is simply slopping over with romance, and somehow she gets more kick out of being wooed under the rose than she does in an above board, honest-to-God courtship. There is something about the secrecy of a love intrigue with a married man, about the surreptitious letters, about the stolen rendezvous, that thrills her to the core of her being. It makes her feel so desperately wicked, like one of the grand passion heroines of her favorite novels, who cried “All for love, and the world well lost” as she chucked her bonnet over the windmill.

It is because the married man is the only man in the world who is out of her reach, and whom she has no right to try to grab; it is because some other woman has set her seal of approval on him by marrying him; it is because an illicit love episode is a streak of lurid romance in her drab days, that the little Totties and Flossies are able to see the hero of their girlish dreams in the fat, bald-headed, middle-aged men for whom they work, and the Mauds and Gwendolyns imagine that they have found their affinities in some ordinary commonplace married man, who would bore them to tears if his wedding ring had not given him a fictitious value in their eyes.

Add to this, vanity and cruelty. In the man hunt, women look on the married man as big game, and when they bring one down they feel as if they had captured an elephant instead of having shot a tame rabbit. There are girls who boast of their conquests among married men, and who have so little heart that they delight in watching the agonies of jealousy that they inflict on the poor defenseless wife. Many young women are likewise gold-diggers, and these virtually confine their attentions to married men, as wealthy bachelors are few and well-to-do middle-aged married men are plentiful and easy.

Why the married man who starts out as a Lothario is an easy winner of feminine hearts is perfectly obvious. To begin with, he has the same advantage that the widower has over the single man. He is a professional, so to speak, instead of an amateur lover. He has the education in women that only marriage can give a man, for he has had a wife and, like the wise man of Kipling’s poem, he “learned about women from her.” He has found out that all women are so hungry for love that they will swallow any soft talk without examining its quality. He has found out that you can jolly a woman into anything. He has found out that women melt down into a mush that you can do with as you will, under a little understanding and sympathy. He has found out that if you remember an anniversary, and a woman’s taste in two or three things, she will believe it an absolute proof of undying devotion.

The married man knows that there is one sure short cut to virtually every woman’s heart. It is pity. And so he begins his love-making by telling the girl that his wife does not understand him, that she is not his real soul-mate, that they have nothing in common, and that his home is bleak, and barren, and unhappy. Generally he accuses his wife of being a human iceberg, while he is a perfect geyser of love and tenderness. And then he moans: “Oh, why did we not meet in time?” And the poor little idiot of a girl undertakes the consolation rôle.

Of course, all of this effective love play is more or less impossible to the bachelor. He lacks the technique of the married man. He cannot appeal to a woman’s sympathies, or pose before her in the rôle of a martyr. He can only make love in the commonplace old way, and it cramps his style. But the real reason that the married man is a devil among women is just the same old reason that made Eve listen to the serpent.

XLIX
FORGET IT

Every day some girl writes me that she is young, quite as pretty as the other girls about her, that she dresses as well, and makes as good an appearance as they do, and strives to please, but that no man ever pays her the slightest attention, or asks her to step out with him of an evening. Then this girl goes on to say that she is a business girl, but she doesn’t make a very good salary, and she is discouraged, and blue, and wants to know what to do.

My advice to a girl in this situation—and there are millions of her—is to forget men. Give up the struggle to attract them. Quit trying to catch one. Renounce romance. Throw away all thoughts of marriage. Just accept the fact that nature did not put you in the vamp class, and play your game of life from that angle.

This counsel will be a bitter pill for the girl to swallow, but she will find it good medicine that will work a speedy and permanent cure, if she will try it on herself. Why certain women are magnets that draw every man they meet to them, and why nothing in trousers except upon compulsion ever goes near other women just as good looking, just as charming in every way, is one of the mysteries nobody has ever solved. Nor has anyone ever been able to suggest a remedy for this state of affairs.

The fast steamship, the lightning express, the aeroplane, have annihilated distance, but human ingenuity has failed to invent any device to make a boy go to see the girl next door if he doesn’t want to go. Science has torn its secrets from the earth, but it cannot find out what quality it is in woman that attracts men. It has invented chemicals that work magic in the physical world, but it has never discovered a reliable love philter.

So that’s that. And it is a wise girl who has the courage to look herself in the face, and see whether she has the “come hither” look in her eye, and if she hasn’t, to recognize the fact, and devote herself to a more promising occupation than chasing men, who, in the end, always make their getaway, unless they desire to be caught.

Therefore, I would urge the girl who does not make a spontaneous hit with men, to quit wasting her time and her energies in the vain attempt to decoy them into noticing her, and to put all that lost motion and force into her work, where she will get better results.

Believe me, if the girl who does not attract men, tried as hard to sell herself to her job as she does to sell herself socially, she would not have to complain long of holding a small position. She would be a highly paid secretary, or buyer, or department manager.

If the girl who does not attract men, studied her employer’s moods and tenses as earnestly as she does those of some little jellybean, and if she was as anxious to please her employer as she is to please the jazz hounds and cakeaters she meets, she would find herself one of the valued employees who are always spoken of reverentially as “our Miss So-and so.”

If the girl who never has a date would put in one hundredth part of the intensive study on her work that she gives to the technique of the popular girl, and to trying to find out something about the psychology of customers or the history of the goods she handles, or the details of the business she is employed in, she would have employers fighting over her.

In a word, if the girl who is not popular with men would concentrate her thoughts, her interests, and her ambitions, on getting ahead in the occupation she has chosen, instead of wasting her time and energies in a fruitless attempt to charm men, she would be a success instead of a failure; she would be happy instead of miserable.

As it is now she falls between the stools. She is a poor makeshift in her job, who gets nowhere, because her one desire, her one ambition, her one aim in life is to attract men and catch a husband, and she is miserable, and discouraged, and bitter, and disgruntled, because she is balked in that attempt. And she is a siren without allure who never arrives at the altar, so she fails both as a business woman, and in her effort to catch a husband.

This is a great pity, because while love and marriage are highly desirable blessings to come into a woman’s life, they are not the whole of life. The world is full of such a lot of things besides sentiment. There is independence, the freedom to come and go as one pleases. There is the exhilarating sport of climbing up the ladder of success, which has a million thrills for every round. There is the solid satisfaction of achievement. There is the good job that keeps one on one’s tiptoes so that one never has a dull moment. There is the happiness that comes of being employed in constructive work. There is one’s own home, with one’s own pots, and pans, and doilies, if one wants them.

Take it from me, girls, the woman who espouses a career does not get the worst husband there is. She has a life companion from whom she never has to wheedle the pennies. She never has to listen to any back talk or criticisms. She is never afraid of this companion getting tired and running off after flappers. It is only the lucky women, who make exceptional marriages, who are as well off as the business girls who do not marry.

Furthermore, there is this comfort to be given the girl who quits trying to attract men, and gets busy with her job. Men are contrary creatures. Pursue them, and they flee from you. Lay traps, and they walk wide of them. But let them alone, indicate that you are indifferent to them; that you are concerned with your own affairs in which they have no part; let them realize that you can get on quite well without them, and it piques their interest. They come flocking around of their own accord to see what manner of woman you are.

Also the girl who makes something of herself, and who rises high in her profession is thrown with the men at the top, the men of brains, and they are often attracted to her while the silly little boys with whom she used to play about were not.

So I say again to the girls who are not attractive to men, stop wasting your time in the useless attempt to vamp men. Put your heart and your soul into your job. Work is the consolation prize God gives us when we miss getting the thing we wanted most.

L
LOST LOVE

Many women ask me how they can regain the love of some man which they have lost. Sometimes, a girl tells me, weeping, of a once ardent lover who has become cold and neglectful, who no longer comes to see her, and she wants to know how to bring him back, and make him once more crazy about her.

Oftenest, however, it is a wife who seeks desperately for some magic whereby she can light again the love fires in the heart of a husband who has ceased to care for her, who is tired of her, and who does not even take the trouble to hide from her the fact that he regards her as a burden, of which he would rid himself if he could.

It is the tragedy of these women that they are doomed to love men after the men no longer love them. Not even neglect, and insult, and faithlessness, kill their affection for those on whom they have set their foolish, doglike hearts. So they cling with desperate hands to the men who are trying to break away from them, hoping against hope, praying some miracle will happen that will give them back their lost love.

But their prayers are never answered. The miracle never happens. No sorcerer can teach a woman how to weave a spell a second time about a man. The love potions that the credulous buy from fortune tellers, never work, and though a woman conjure never so deftly, she cannot bring back the heart that has slipped out of her keeping.

For of all dead things, nothing is so dead as dead love. No power can breathe into it again the breath of life, and make it a vital thing once more.

We do not know why we love. We do not know why some particular man or woman makes a peculiar appeal that makes us prefer him or her to all the other men and women in the world. We do not know why the touch of certain hands thrill us; why the quirk of a smile, or the look in an eye, draws us; why we have a sense of comradeship with certain individuals; why some man or woman fascinates us; or why we desire one man or woman more than another, who may be better looking, more intelligent, more worthy in every way.

Nor do we any more know why we cease to love than we know why we love. We do not know why the touch of the hand that has thrilled us ceases to thrill; nor why the charm that was once so potent vanishes into thin air, nor why the fascination flees, and the one who once held us enthralled becomes a bore who wearies us to tears. It just happens, and we are as helpless before one situation as before the other.

There are not many men who are cruel enough to find sport in breaking a woman’s heart, and who deliberately win a girl’s love, and play with it, and fling it away. There are not many husbands who would not remain their wives’ eternal lovers, if it was in their power to control their affections. That was their romantic dream when they married. That way their happiness lay, and they would have kept their romance had it been a matter of their own volition.

Unfortunately, the disillusion came. The glory and the circling wings departed. Somehow their wives lost their allure for them, and strive as they might, they could not see them again with the eyes of a lover, or bring back their charm. Many a man would be just as glad to fall in love again with his wife as she would be to have him fall in love with her once more, but he cannot do it. You cannot fan dead ashes into a flame.

Perhaps if wives realized how impossible it is to resurrect a dead love, they would guard the living love more carefully, and run fewer risks of killing it. They would not take the chance of disillusioning their husbands by going about sloppy and slovenly at home, and thus presenting a fatal contrast to the trimly dressed women in their offices, and the beautified ladies they meet in society. They would reflect that no man would have much appetite for domestic kisses when flavored with cold cream, and that if a wife wishes to be regarded as a ladylove, she must look the part instead of resembling a sack of potatoes.

And they would see to it that love is not assassinated on their hearthstones by ceaseless, senseless quarrels, by whining, and complaining, and nagging, and petty tyrannies. Nor would they permit love to die of that commonest and most deadly ailment, boredom. For if a woman can interest her husband enough before marriage to make him pick her out from all the rest of the world for his life partner, she can interest him enough to hold him until the end of the chapter if she is willing to take the trouble and perform the labor necessary to do so.

If, though, a woman, through carelessness or ignorance, has lost the love of the man she loves, there is absolutely no way in which she can win it back. Through duty or a sense of honor she may hold his body, but his soul has gone from her forever, and she is wise if she accepts the inevitable.

If she is a girl, she should let the sweetheart who is tired of her go, instead of trying to hold him. Some other man she may make love her, but not the old one for whom she has lost her charm.

If she is a married woman whose husband has ceased to love her, let her agonize no more over the impossible task of reviving his passion for her. Let her fill her life with other interests and thank God that there are so many other pleasant things in the world besides love.

For of this she may rest assured. There is no reviving of dead love. When once we have lost our taste for a person everything is over. It is finished, as the French say.

LI
THE SHOW WEDDING

The Turks have passed a law prohibiting elaborate and costly marriage ceremonials, and forbidding the giving of expensive wedding presents. What a pity that we cannot have such an edict issued in this country! For there is no other one thing that would do more to allay heartburnings and jealousies, prevent nervous prostration and bankruptcy, and promote peace and thrift than to officially “can” the show wedding.

In all fairness, we must admit that the display wedding is a feminine vice. No man, probably, ever really yearned to make a public exhibition of himself as he was being led as a lamb to the slaughter. But by the time she is ten years old the average girl has begun planning her wedding and deciding whether she will have a big church affair, with ushers and flower girls and ring-bearers and maids and matrons of honor and bridesmaids and a white satin dress and a real lace veil, and all the other flubdubs, or whether she will be married at home under a floral canopy, with an admiring audience fenced off from her by white ribbons. And to realize this ten-minute splurge she is ready to ruthlessly ruin her family and half kill herself. If she doesn’t get it, she goes through life feeling that she has missed her big moment. It is from this silly, dopey daydream that women should be rescued by law, since few of them have the common sense and good taste to put it aside themselves.

To begin with, it would do away with the disgraceful, barefaced holdups that precede weddings. These are camouflaged under the appropriate name of “showers,” for they cause every friend of an engaged girl to shed salt and bitter tears at the realization of how much they will be mulcted for in silk-stocking showers, and handkerchief showers, and towel showers, and kitchen showers, and all the other showers that go to make up a bridal deluge. It would also prevent that sinking feeling at the pit of the stomach with which we are attacked at sight of a large, thick white envelope in the mail. We know that it means a “stand-and-deliver” present, which somehow always comes just at a time when the rent is overdue, or a doctor bill has to be paid, or we had saved up a little money by pinching economies to buy a new hat or suit.

It isn’t that we are stingy or mean, or that we begrudge a gift to a friend. It is only that we would like to give when we can do so freely, and enjoy the giving, instead of having to give at a time when it is actually dishonest to bestow a present. Why, I have known people who had to put off needed dental work or taking a sick child to the country when three or four wedding presents fell together. The wedding gift was a debt of honor. “They sent us a set of salad forks.” “She gave us a clock when we were married,” and it had to be returned in kind. The abolition of the show wedding would prolong the days of many a poor, old, hard-worked father, whose daughter’s trousseau is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

It is not because she needs them, or has any use for them, that Sally Ann, who is a poor girl marrying a poor young man, has to have piles of orchid chiffon undergarments, hand-embroidered and belaced and beribboned. It is because they are to be displayed to her catty friends, who will finger them, and appraise them, and criticize them, and then go home wondering how her father is ever going to pay for them. If her lingerie were not Exhibit A at the wedding Sally Ann would go along and provide herself with a reasonable amount of underwear that would stand wear and washing, and not run papa into debt.

But Sally Ann has to have her show wedding. She has to trail up the church aisle in her white satin and her tulle veil, and all the rest of it. And by the time father has paid for the church and the flowers, and the bridesmaid’s presents, and the reception, and the automobiles, he has had to borrow money at the bank and has saddled himself with a debt that bends his back a little more, and puts new lines in his face, and adds to his burden in work and worry, which was already more than he could bear. And it has all been for a few minutes’ flaunting of herself in the face of an audience of people who smiled and nudged each other, and said: “Did you ever see her look so homely? Brides always look their worst.” “Wonder what he ever saw in her to make him pick her out.” “Is that the bridegroom? Looks like a scared rabbit.” “How on earth do you suppose her father will ever pay for this? Everybody knows he can’t afford it,” and so on, and so on. Just what everybody says at a wedding.

Above all, the abolition of the show wedding and the saving of the foolish expenditure it involved would enable many a young couple to set up housekeeping out of debt; and, best of all, they would begin life simply and honestly, and with the admiration and gratitude of all who know them. Getting married is the crucial act in a man’s and woman’s life. It is the most awful and solemn thing they ever do. And why they want to have a thousand curious eyes peering at them when they take the step that is going to plunge them into hell or lift them into heaven passes comprehension. It would not be more incongruous to send out invitations to people to come and watch you die than it is to come and see you married.

Wise that young couple who simply slip around to the parson and make their vows at the altar, with no one but God to look on.

LII
WHEN YOUR CHILDREN ARE GLAD YOU DIE

Parents seem to run to extremes. Of the common, or garden, variety of fathers and mothers there appears to be two types. One is the overindulgent, which lavishes too much money, too many fine clothes, too many motorcars on its offspring, and that brings up its children to be idle and worthless wasters and spenders. The other type of parent is the Spartan one that is as hard as nails, unsympathetic, close-fisted; that denies its children every indulgence, and that holds to the theory that the harder it makes life for the young the better it is for them. Both schools of thought are wrong.

Undoubtedly, parents make a very great mistake when they sacrifice everything to their children and make doormats of themselves for their children to walk on. They weaken their sons and daughters by pampering them too much and by standing between them and the struggle that alone makes muscle of body and soul, and they do their children a cruel injustice by cultivating in them extravagant tastes and habits that perhaps they cannot later on give them the money to gratify. Certainly it is an unedifying spectacle to behold, as we often do, a mother in patched, made-over clothes, while her daughters fare forth in the latest imported Parisian models, or a seedy father riding on the street car while son burns up the road in a speedy sports car and is decked out like Solomon in all his glory.

Also we can but deplore the folly of parents who skimp, and slave, and deny themselves every comfort in order that their daughters can make a splurge in society, and that their sons may loaf through college courses, where they acquire nothing but a college yell and a contempt for their hump-shouldered old dads. We could weep when we see tired old women who are converted into unpaid nursemaids by their married daughters who are always coming in and dumping their babies down on mother when they want to go off on a trip or play bridge. And what tears we have left we could shed over the men whose sons are always getting into trouble and coming back to father for help when they know that they are robbing him of the pittance he has saved up for his old age.

But between doing everything for your children and doing nothing at all for them is a long step, and the parents who do not help their children to get a start in life fail just as much in doing their duty to them as do the foolishly fond parents who kill their children’s initiative by swaddling them in cotton wool. Of course, necessity is a grim teacher. If you chuck a child into the water where it must sink or swim, it is pretty apt to strike out and keep afloat somehow. And it is true that a great many successful men and women are the children of parents who were so poor that they could do nothing for them, and that they fought their way to an education and battled their way to success against all sorts of hardships. But there is a great difference between the parents who cannot help their children and those who will not help their children, between the fathers and mothers who would give their heart’s blood to their children and those who will not give them a few dollars. And while the children may feel all love and reverence for the poor parents who were powerless to assist them, they can but feel bitter resentment toward the parents who stand callously by, watching their struggles without holding out a helping hand.

A large number of parents have an idea that it does young people good to be deprived of pleasures, to be reared to no indulgences, to know hardships. And so even when they have plenty of money they deny their children pretty clothes and the advantages of education and travel, and when they get married they let them scuffle for themselves. They do not give the girl a dowry nor set the boy up in business.

It seems to me that this is a cruel and an inhuman thing to do, and that it serves no purpose but to kill in the child’s breast every particle of affection it had for its father and mother. For it dooms the children to years of struggle and self-sacrifice, pinching economies and anxieties that it might so easily have escaped. And God knows that life is not so easy for any of us that we can afford to have any of the pleasure taken out of it.

It also often shuts the door of opportunity for the child or puts off success for many weary years. The few thousands of dollars that father might have invested in the firm which would have raised Tom from being a clerk to a partner might have carried him on to fortune. If father would have financed the extra course of study in his profession for John, he would have achieved success and begun big money making years before he did. If father had given Mary an allowance big enough to hire servants, she would not have worked herself to death cooking, and washing, and baby tending. But father wouldn’t do it. He held on to every penny and let his children fight it out the best way they could. The daughter of such a man once said to me:

“My father is dead and I have inherited a large fortune, but it has come to me too late to do me any real good. When I was a girl I never had any pretty clothes. I never had a nice home to invite my friends to. I never had any indulgences. I never could even go with the people I was entitled to go with because I did not live in the style they did. I married a poor man and my father never helped us. I wore my youth out in housework that I was not strong enough to do. If he had given me $10,000 when I needed it, it would have done me more good than all that I have inherited does me now.”

The moral of all of which is, do not sacrifice yourself to your children; do not impoverish yourself for them, but help than all you can while they are young and while they need it, if you do not wish them to be glad when you are dead and your will is read.

LIII
WHAT PRICE PLEASURE?

Do you ever ask yourself if you are not paying too high a price for many of the things in which you indulge yourself? So far as material things go, most of us are keen enough about seeing that we get our money’s worth. We do not pay a thousand dollars for a string of glass beads. We do not buy a battered flivver at Rolls Royce figures, nor will we stand being charged banquet prices for a corned beef and cabbage dinner.

When it comes to spiritual values, however, we lose all sense of proportion. We become spendthrifts, who throw our priceless treasures away, and we literally sell our birthrights for a mess of pottage. One thinks of this particularly just now when one watches so many young persons making such bad and losing bargains with fate. There are the boys scarcely out of their teens who think it is such a sporting thing, so dashing, and that it shows that they are such men of the world to carry flasks on their hips and drink the vile poison that bootleggers sell. For the sake of the kick they get out of this and for a few minutes’ exhilaration, they are risking not only death itself, but what is far, far worse, blindness and imbecility and every sort of nervous ailment.

Look at the pasty-faced, blear-eyed youths with shaking hands that you see all about you, their minds dulled, their energies paralyzed, their ambitions killed by drink; who are done with life before they have ever begun to live. What a price they have paid for booze! Can any boy look at a drunken sot, dirty, poor, despised, and think that the pleasure that he has got out of drink has paid for what it cost him?

And the girls. The girls who are mad for gaiety, crazy for the admiration of men; the girls who go on drinking parties, who indulge in petting parties, who joy-ride until all hours of the night, who let men kiss and fondle them because that is the price that men demand for taking them out. How cheaply they sell themselves! Many a girl pays with shame and disgrace that follow her to the longest day she lives for a single wild party. They buy their fun high, these girls who exchange for it their self-respect, their modesty, their maidenly innocence and their good names.

The family quarrel. That is a domestic luxury for which we have to pay so dearly that it is never worth the cost. Undoubtedly, when one is feeling cross, and irritable, and disgruntled, there is a certain luxury in letting go all of one’s self-control, and turning one’s temper loose, and stabbing right and left with cruel words that wound like dagger thrusts. Also it salves one’s own conscience to lay the blame for everything that goes wrong on some one else. Therefore, many husbands and wives go on a daily orgy of nerves and temper. They vent their spleen against life on each other. They say to each other all the mean and hateful things that they are too politic to say to strangers.

But the price they pay! It bankrupts them. For they kill each other’s love. They slay each other’s respect. They inevitably come to hate each other and to cherish secret grudges, born of insult and injustice. There is no peace nor tenderness in their homes and their marriages either end in divorce or become long drawn out misery. What a price to pay for the lack of a little self-control!

Extravagance. The price of indulging yourself in your youth in the things that you cannot afford is poverty and dependence in your old age. The woman who cannot resist pretty clothes. The woman who is bitten by the society bug and who tries to keep up with people better off than she is. The man who belongs to lodges, when he can’t pay the rent collector. The man who buys an automobile and a radio on the instalment plan. They will pay, as sure as fate, for gratifying the desire of the moment by long years of bitter dependence. Twenty or thirty years from now they will be down and out, and they will either be in almshouses or the hangers on of relatives, who resent having to take care of Poor Uncle John or Cousin Susan. Or they will be burdens on their children, who are having all they can do to take care of their own families.

The highest priced cars in the world are not the gold-plated, satin-lined jewel boxes made for millionaires. They are the cheap little cars bought by the people who cannot afford them and who have to go into debt for them.

And there is the price the lazy pay for shiftlessness. And the price the mother pays who lets her children roam the streets while she plays bridge or goes to clubs. And the price the sarcastic pay who alienate a friend for the sake of making a witty speech. There are a thousand other little gratifications of a mood or inclination, the desire of a moment, that we pay for with tears, with loneliness, with failure, with our very heart’s blood. What a pity we don’t count the cost of things before we indulge ourselves in them!

LIV
THE IDEAL MOTHER

A woman asks: “What qualities should the ideal mother possess?”

To begin with, a mother should have love, and tenderness, and sympathy, and be willing to sacrifice herself for her children. These are the stock virtues of motherhood, and virtually all mothers possess them. But they alone do not make a woman a good mother. Often they do as much harm as good, for you can ruin a child by blind devotion. You can enfeeble it by too much tenderness. You can make it a selfish egotist and an overbearing brute by making yourself a doormat for it to walk over. So to love, tenderness, sympathy and unselfishness the ideal mother must add other qualities, and the most important of these is the ability to see her job as a whole and to realize that she is responsible for the finished goods that she turns out.

Not many mothers have this vision; or, rather, they shut their eyes and refuse to see that the molding of their children’s characters, the settling of their destinies, is in their own hands. They let a high-tempered child grow up undisciplined and without teaching it any self-control. They let a slothful, lazy one grow up without forming habits of industry. They never teach a self-indulgent, greedy child to curb its appetite. They spoil and pamper their children, and then they say that they “hope” their children will turn out all right!

The ideal mother knows that you form children’s characters in the cradle, and so she does not trust to luck with her youngsters. She begins when they are babies to teach them self-control, and thrift, and industry, and all the principles of right living. The ideal mother must have a backbone. Unfortunately, most mothers permit their hearts to crowd out their spinal column until they have no more backbone than a fishing worm. This is why you hear women say despairingly that they can’t do a thing with their 10-year-old child.

It takes nerve, and grit, and determination, and courage to fight self-willed youngsters, and mother is too soft to do it. So she gives in rather than listen to her baby’s howls of rage or go through the struggle of conquering a disobedient child. And the inevitable result is that her children have a contempt for her as a weakling, and ride roughshod over her, and become the outbreaking young hoodlums who fill our jails and brothels.

The ideal mother is a human being. She doesn’t pose before her children as a plaster saint or an oracle on a pedestal. One of the reasons why children do not confide in their parents is because the average father and mother pretend that they were such models of all the virtues when they were young that their children feel they have nothing in common with them and that they wouldn’t understand how a boy or girl feels who wants to do all sorts of foolish things.

How can a girl tell her mother that a boy kissed her, if mother represents herself as Miss Prunes and Prisms, and says that when she was young girls never skylarked, and never went on joy-rides or to cabarets, or held hands in the movies, but spent a pleasant evening sitting up in the parlor in the presence of their elders discussing improving topics?

It is the human mothers who can sympathize with their children’s desire for good times and help them to them; who will stretch a point to get a girl a new frock or a boy the fraternity pin he craves, who get well enough acquainted with their children to really help them and guard them.

The ideal mother has a sense of proportion. She doesn’t see her ducklings as swans. Her love doesn’t blind her to her children’s faults and blemishes. Rather it sharpens her vision, so that she gets a line on them as they really are. Thereby she is enabled to help them make the most of such gifts as they have. She sees that Tom is brilliant but unstable and lacking in purpose, and she holds him to whatever he undertakes to do until she forms the habit of steadfastness in him. She sees that John is dull but a plodder, and she trains him for some occupation in which quickness of mind is not demanded and in which the prizes go to faithfulness and hard work. She sees that Mary is intelligent but homely, and lacking the charms that allure men, so she gives her some occupation by which she can make a good living for herself and which will fill her life with interest. And this sense of proportion keeps her from making her children ridiculous by bragging about them, and boring every one with whom she comes in contact with endless stories of what wonderful and marvelous creatures they are, and how, wherever they go, they are the cynosure of all eyes and the admiration of all beholders.

Finally, the ideal mother should have a sense of humor that will enable her to laugh instead of cry over many of her children’s peccadilloes and keep her from taking them too seriously. For the thing that ails young people is chiefly youth, and they will get over that if you will give them a little time. Because they are idle, irresponsible, pleasure-loving, dance-mad, girl and boy crazy is no reason for prophesying dismal things about them and wringing your hands in despair. It is a passing phase of life at which we elders may well grin, remembering the time when we also were young and foolish. An old woman who had raised up a remarkable family of sons and daughters once gave me this as her recipe for bringing up children: “Kiss them when they are good. Spank them when they’re bad and teach them to obey you.” That is the whole of the law and the prophets.

LV
HOW TO CATCH A WIFE

“You are always telling girls how to catch husbands,” says a young man. “Why don’t you give us chaps a few tips about how to get wives?”

Well, son, perhaps I unconsciously favor women because I belong to their lodge. Also, it is more difficult for a woman to catch a husband than it is for a man to get a wife, not only because women are more inclined to matrimony than men are, but because a woman’s pursuit of a man has to be stealthy and secret and under cover, with all of her tracks carefully hidden and her purposes veiled, whereas a man can go after a woman openly and aboveboard, with everybody looking on and applauding the chase. Therefore, the woman is more in need of any stray hints that may improve her technique than the man is. Still, far be it from me to withhold from my brothers any information I may have about the short cuts to the feminine heart. So to the really earnest seeker after knowledge on this subject I would say:

First. Study your girl. Catalogue her. Find out to what type she belongs and adapt your tactics to the situation, for all women no more rise to the same line of courtship than all fish bite at the same bait. There are some feminine hearts that can only be taken by assault and battery and others that surrender to patient siege. There are women whose love is for sale to the highest bidder and others who bestow it in pity. There are women who like a business proposition and women who fall only for the romantic wooing. So there you are, and your success will depend upon your ability to psychoanalyze the particular woman and upon the skill with which you suggest to her that you are the great unsatisfied need of her soul.

If the girl is of the clear-eyed, upstanding, competent business type, your best method of winning her is by the good, old, well-tried Platonic friendship method. She isn’t anxious to exchange a mahogany desk for a kitchen range nor to give up a good pay envelope and an easy job to toil for some man for nothing. Likewise, she has worked with men too long for her to see any rosy halo around the masculine brow, so she is pretty apt to shy off at any suggestion of marriage and balk at the thought of the altar. But life lacks savor to every woman without masculine society, and so this particular type of woman is especially allured by the idea of a beautiful and satisfying friendship with some man. And when a chap has got his toe that far into the door to a woman’s heart it is his own fault if he does not open it all the way.

Only there is this word of warning: Never pop the question to the business girl in the morning of a sunshiny day when she has on a new frock and a good hat and everything is going swimmingly at the office and she feels fit and fine and ready to buck the world. Instead, choose a rainy evening, when she is sitting alone at home, dejected and forlorn, when she is tired and the boss has been grumpy. Then the thing she wants most on earth is just a nice, strong masculine shoulder to cry on.

If the girl you want is a flapper, your best ally is your bankbook. All you need to look good to her is to be a good spender and a fast worker. Hold not your hand and count not the cost of jewelry and trinketry and candy and flowers and cabarets and eats and joy-rides, and remember that the man with the longest purse wins. Some day she will jazz with you to the preacher, and you will live scrappily ever afterward.

If the girl upon whom your affections are set is a demure little Puritan, make her your Mother Confessor. Confide to her all your sins, real and imaginary. Invent a dark past for her benefit. Make her believe that but for her Sacred Influence you would become an abandoned character and that she alone can lead you up to the higher life. All women have the reformation complex, and the better they are and the less they know of the world the harder they fall for the belief that a grown man’s character is like a piece of dough that they can mold into any shape they please. Once let a girl get the idea into her head that she is responsible for your soul, and she is yours for the taking.

If the girl you want is one that you made mud pies with in childhood and went to school with, and who refuses to see you in a sentimental light, don’t be discouraged by her telling you that she will be a sister to you. Just keep right on strutting your Rachel-and-Jacob stuff. Mighty few women can resist that. Make yourself a habit with the girl. Make yourself necessary to her happiness and comfort by always paying her the little attentions that women like. Fetch and carry for her. Be the one person in the world she can always depend upon to make life pleasant and agreeable for her.

Then suddenly drop her cold. Begin paying furious attentions to some woman she always accuses of being made up and older than she looks and an artful hussy, and it is a hundred-to-one bet that she will call you back and let you see that her feelings toward you were not at all what she had supposed they were. For when she thinks you are about to marry another woman she will wake up to the fact that life will be cinders, ashes and dust without you.

If the girl you desire is one of the morbid sort who hangs between “I will” and “I won’t,” who is always vivisecting her heart and taking her emotional temperature, what you need to use is caveman methods. She is just dying to have you drag her to the altar by the hair of her head, and if you are half a man you will do it. Don’t ever ask that kind of a woman to marry you. Tell her you are going to marry her and that you have the license and the ring in your pocket and are on the way to the chapel with her, and you will give her a thrill that will last a lifetime.

These are only a few of the many ways to win a wife. It is dead easy, and any man can do it who has gumption enough to work out a cross-word puzzle.

LVI
DANGEROUS GIRLS

Chief among the women from whom a young man should pray his guardian angel to deliver him is the Hinting Girl. She is a gentle grafter who holds up every man she meets with a pair of innocent-looking blue eyes that bid him stand and deliver just as effectually and efficiently as if he were looking down the barrels of a couple of blue-nosed revolvers in the hands of a highway robber. You will find these cheerful workers, son, where you least expect them. The very highest society is filled with girls of undisputed position and unquestioned morals, who ruthlessly plunder every man they meet, and you will never encounter an individual more to be feared than these bandits of the parlor.

Did you ever wonder why one girl receives so many more presents than another, and why every man who passes lays some offering on her shrine? Take it from me, this is the result of science and not mere chance. Observe, closely, and you will see, when you call, that she steers the conversation artfully around to the latest play, and before you know it you have offered to take her to it.

Also, she has let you know that violets are her favorite flower, and the date of her birthday. Before Christmas she artlessly confides in you where there is the jeweled vanity, or the hand-painted fan, that she has set her heart upon, and she couldn’t shout it at you any plainer if she bawled it to you through a megaphone that she expects you to come across, and will think you a piker if you don’t.

Beware the Hinting Girl, son. She is the woman who is accessory before the crime of half of the embezzlements of trusted clerks who go wrong, and who, if she got her deserts, would stand in the prisoners’ dock by the side of the poor, weak, trembling boy who has stolen to buy her jewels or to give her a good time. And she makes the sort of wife whose husband rises up and sits down to a never-ending chant of “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!”

Then there’s the Girl With a Past. Very often she has been more sinned against than sinning. Probably her morals are just as good as your own, son; but, even so, such marriages rarely turn out happily. For we have to face the naked fact that, while a man may love a woman well enough to forget and forgive her indiscretions, society, which is not in love with her, remembers them all. And it reminds her husband that it recalls them. The man who marries a Woman With a Past is pretty much in the same fix as the man who hires a reformed embezzler to be his cashier. He hopes he will run straight, but he keeps an eye on the cash box—a situation which doesn’t make for domestic felicity. Of course, there are women who reform and gather in their wild oats crops and ever after raise nothing but garden truck around their doorstep, but even while their husbands are devouring their domestic cabbages and onions there rarely comes a family spat in which they do not throw in their wives’ teeth the kind of farmers they have been. The truth is that it takes a big man and woman to defy the conventions. That is what makes it safest for those of us who are little people to play the game according to the rules laid down by Hoyle. And one of these rules is that women must keep their skirts clean. By and large it is a good rule, son, for it means the purity of race, the integrity of society and a lot of other things that keep this old world going.

Then there’s the Weeping Girl. Whenever you meet with a gentle, sweet, soft, babyish-looking little girl, with a chin that trembles and big eyes that overflow with tears at the slightest provocation, and who can cry without her nose getting red, fly, son, fly. She will fasten herself upon you, and when you try to make a getaway she will cling to you and weep. And no man can behold unmoved a woman crying for him, because he is such a good thing. You will stop to wipe her eyes; and all will be over with you except the long, long years of rainy matrimony when you will have to deal with a wife who cannot be reasoned with or cajoled or coerced into doing anything she doesn’t want to do, because you will be so afraid of starting another freshet of tears.

Then there’s the Domestic Girl, who baits her hook with angels’ food. You might go farther and do worse than marry the Domestic Girl, for while romance is transient one’s appetite remains, and after one’s illusions are gone it is a comfortable thing to have a good dinner to fall back upon. Still, one must confess, the Domestic Girl is apt to have only a bread-and-butter conversation, of which a man might tire in time; so, unless your stomach is developed in excess of your heart, walk warily when the Domestic Girl begins to inveigle you into little meals for two that she cooks for you under a pink-shaded lamp.

Lastly, there is the girl who is just near you—the girl you work with, or who lives in the same boarding house with you, or who comes to visit your sister. Men who have escaped the dangers of all other women are the victims of propinquity which unites them to ladies they couldn’t otherwise have seen through a telescope. Somehow our very nearness to the people with whom we are thrown every day keeps us from getting a perspective on their faults and disabilities, and habit deceives us into thinking that they are more necessary to us than they are. And so we drift into the mismated marriages that keep the divorce courts busy and the world salted down with the brine of our tears.

Therefore, if you perceive that Mamie, whom you thought vulgar at first, no longer gets on your nerves; if you observe that Sadie, who bored you when you first met her, is beginning to interest you with her chatter about what “he said” and “I said,” and you discover that you have quit being shocked by Carrie’s gum-chewing and Mabel’s grammar, then, son, pack your trunk and leave while the leaving is good. Otherwise, the Girl Next to You will get you sure.

But why amplify the list? Some day a girl will tag you, and you will know you are “it,” and a million warnings could not save you from your fate.

LVII
WHEN A GIRL LOVES A MAN

A youth asks me how he can tell whether a girl loves him or not. Well, son, you can’t always tell. There are times when all signs fail, and there is no man so clever, so discerning, so sophisticated that a woman cannot fool him if she set her mind to doing so. For the many generations in which women were entirely subservient to men, and in which they had to get everything they had out of men, and in which all their pleasures and perquisites depended on their wheedling and cajoling men, have made them gifted liars and adept at befooling men.

However, the modern girl, being able to make her own living, and stand upon her own feet, and therefore being to a large degree independent of men, has less need to simulate emotions which she does not feel, and so she has lost the fine technique of her mother and her grandmother and her great-great-great grandmother. Flirting has become a lost art, and the methods of the gold-digger are so crude and raw that any man who is taken in by one deserves all he gets. The average girl is almost brutally frank about the state of her feelings. She hasn’t even subtlety enough about her to keep a man guessing.

But there is, of course, a sort of no-man’s land that lies between liking and loving in which the girl wanders, herself as uncertain and bewildered as you are. And, I take it, it is across this dangerous terrain that you wish to be guided. Sally is dear and sweet to you. She apparently enjoys your society, and you never have any trouble in making dates with her. She is the best little pal ever. But what you want to know is whether she cares for you just as she does for half a dozen other chaps, or whether you are the ONLY ONE.

First, Is she willing to sit at home of an evening with you or not? If she comes down with her hat on to receive you, or if she always wants to step out somewhere, you have not touched her heart. She regards you merely as a purveyor of good times, a theater ticket and a dancing partner, and any other youth who had the price would do as well. But things have got serious with her when she proposes to spend the evening at home under a pink-shaded lamp. That shows that she has begun to live a romance with more thrills to it than anything she can see depicted on the stage, and that she thinks that Valentino is a poor dub at love-making compared to you. Also it indicates that she desires to isolate you, to cut you out from the herd and put her brand upon you. Cupid is essentially a monopolist. Especially the Lady Cupid. The first thing that a woman does when she falls in love with a man is to try to shut him away from all other women. So long as a girl wants to go in crowds there is nothing doing with her in the love line. If she really cares for you, she will maneuver to get you off to herself.

Next. Observe how a girl treats your pocketbook. If she gets everything out of you that she can; if, when you go out, she has to have a taxi to convey her three blocks, although she can walk ten miles around a department store without turning a hair; if she always suggests orchids when flowers are mentioned, and invariably picks out the most expensive places to dance and the highest-priced dishes on the menu, you may be certain that she has no serious intentions concerning you. You are merely the good thing that a merciful Providence has brought forward for her sustenance. But when a girl begins to talk economy to a boy; when she suggests going to the movies instead of to the theatre; when she orders a ham sandwich instead of a chicken breast and mushrooms under glass, it is an unmistakable sign that she is regarding his bankroll as her own and is commencing to save up for furniture for her future home.

Next—and this is an acid test—talk to the girl about yourself and observe her reaction to it. Monologue along to her by the hour about what you are doing, about what you have done in the past and what you expect to do in the future. Tell her all about what you said to the boss and what the boss said to you. Explain to her all the details of the grocery business. Regale her with reminiscences of your childhood, when you were a fat little boy with green freckles on your hands.

If she yawns in your face or if she listens with the expression of a martyr being nailed to the cross; if she gets up and walks around the room or turns on the radio or interrupts you to ask what you think of the President’s foreign policy, you may as well abandon hope. Her affection is merely gold plated, not the real thing. But if she laps up your talk about yourself and asks for more; if she begs you to repeat that darling story of how naughty you were to your nurse, and if she sits, goggle-eyed with excitement, on the edge of her chair while you relate how you sold a bill of goods to a hard customer, rest assured that her heart is yours for keeps. For there are only two women in the world, a man’s mother and the woman who is his wife or hopes to be his wife, who want to hear him talk about himself.

Take note also of a girl’s attitude toward you. As long as she regards you as an intelligent, husky, able-bodied man, capable of taking care of yourself and with sense enough to come in out of the rain, her regard for you is merely platonic. But when a girl suddenly becomes anxious about the state of your health, when she worries over your getting your feet wet and is afraid you are not getting enough vitamines in your diet, when she warns you not to forget to put on your overcoat if it is cold and to look out for automobiles when you cross the street, then it is safe to begin pricing engagement rings.

Of course, there are other signs of love, such as a girl developing an acute attack of domesticity and passing up the display of French frocks in a window for that of aluminum pots and pans, and especially when she begins dragging a man to church with her, which are not to be ignored. But when a maiden begins to mother a chap and indicates that her idea of spending a perfectly hilarious evening is just to be alone with him, listening to him talk about himself, she is his for the taking.

LVIII
MARRIAGE LESSONS

What has marriage taught you?

“The chief thing that marriage has taught me,” said a man who has had forty years of experience in matrimony, “is that women are human beings. When a man acquires that piece of information it always gives him a bit of a jolt, for most men never really think of women as human beings at all. They think, according to their kind, of women as angels, above all earthly passions, with no nerves or tempers, or selfish cravings for pleasure and who find their joy in life in loving the unlovable and forgiving the unforgivable and being a sweet, gooey, sticky mass of gentleness and patience and unselfishness. Or they think of women as being baby dolls to be dressed up and played with and put on the shelf when they are tired of them. Or they think of women as pieces of household machinery—sort of automatic, self-starting cooks and carpet sweepers and washers and menders, who run on their own power and who don’t even have to be oiled up with a few lubricating words of praise now and then.

“And so husbands treat their wives according to their conception of what women are, and that is why marriage is so often a failure and why there are so many divorces. Women don’t want to be regarded either as saints or toys or domestic conveniences. They want to be treated as human beings and have their husbands give them the same sort of a square deal a man gives his business partner.

“About nine-tenths of the spats that married people have are over money. It gets on the husband’s nerves to have the woman eternally dunning him for money. It seems to him that before he gets his hat off in the evening she begins asking for a few dollars for this and for that. Then the bills come in, and they are always bigger than he expected, and he rows about it, and she thinks that he is stingy.

“The trouble is that the man isn’t treating his wife like a rational human being. He is expecting her to be a miracle worker and run a house on air. He is humiliating her and making her feel that he is a tyrant by making her come like a beggar to him for every penny because he has got an idea that women don’t mind panhandling. Furthermore, he is expecting her to gauge her expenditures wisely, when she hasn’t the faintest idea of what her resources are.

“I have found out that it saves friction over money to make my wife as liberal an allowance as I can. I have found out that if you will explain to a woman just exactly how the financial situation stands in the family and why you can’t afford the thing she wants she will not only do without it gladly but cut down her expenses in other ways and help you to save. It is believing that their husbands are holding out on them and not splitting fifty-fifty with them that makes women reckless spenders.

“And I have found that a man is a fool who lies to his wife. In the end she always catches up with him, and then she imagines things ten times worse than they were. If a man telephones his wife that he is going to stay downtown and meet a customer from Oshkosh and she learns that he really played poker with the boys she pictures a scene of wild debauchery and leaps to the conclusion that he is leading the double life and he never hears the last of it. But if he tells her just what he is going to do she is so flattered at being trusted and thought broadminded enough not to begrudge her husband an evening’s pleasure that she goes to bed and goes to sleep instead of waiting up for him with a curtain lecture sizzling in her mind.

“Marriage has taught me that women think more of words than they do of deeds and that a woman would rather have her husband tell her that he loves her than to have him work his fingers to the bone for her and never make her a soft speech. As long as a husband tells his wife how beautiful she is and how he would like to deck her out in diamonds and sables she is perfectly content to do without them and wear hand-me-downs. It is only when she thinks that he doesn’t care whether she has fine clothes or not that she gets peevish over not having the finery that other women have.

“Marriage has taught me that in the family circle the hammer is a boomerang that returns and annihilates the hammerer. If you knock your wife’s cooking she says, ‘What’s the use of trying to please you?’ and makes no effort to improve; but if you praise her dinners she breaks her neck trying to make them better and better. If you criticize the size of the bills she revenges herself by buying something that really cost money; but if you tell her what a help she is to you and what a marvelous manager, she becomes a nickel-nurser.

“If you find fault with her hat or her dress, you have to buy her a new one; but if you tell her how becoming her last year’s costume is and how it brings out her lines, she will wear it into shreds. Marriage has taught me that if you let your wife know that you admire her and appreciate her, that you are grateful to her for all that she does for you and that you try to do all in your power to make her happy, she will repay you a thousandfold and there is nothing she won’t do for you and no fault she won’t overlook in you.”

LIX
THE SUPERIOR BUSINESS WOMAN

The other day a man killed his beautiful young wife because she was a better “business man” than he was and made more money. The woman loved her husband and was good to him. She was ambitious for him. She got him a job with the people for whom she worked and tried to push him along and help him in every way. But it simply was not in him to be the go-getter that she was. She was a success and he was a failure. And in the frenzy of morbid jealousy that this engendered in him, he slew her.

Thus vividly do we have brought to our attention one of the new difficulties that the advent of women into the business world has injected into the already complicated matrimonial proposition. It makes the question of how the modern wife can best be a helpmeet to her husband one that takes a Solomon in petticoats to answer. In olden times the matter was perfectly simple. The woman who wanted to help her husband along had only to be a good and thrifty manager, to pare the potatoes thin enough and squeeze the nickels. She did her part in building up the family fortunes by saving. But, in many cases to-day, the old woman’s granddaughter is a crackerjack business woman who sees that she can help her husband more by earning than by scrimping, and that she can make more money in one year in business than she could save in ten years by doing her own housework and wearing shabby clothes. So, as long as she is working for their common good, the woman cannot understand why her husband shouldn’t be just as willing for her to help him by working in an office as in a kitchen, or why the wife who does brain labor isn’t as good a wife as the one who does manual labor.

But the great majority of women who continue to follow any gainful pursuit after marriage find out that, while there is a new woman who looks at everything in life from a new angle, there is no new man. Women have changed in their relationship to man, but men stand pat just where Adam did when it comes to dealing with women.

If you will notice, it is only women who prate about equality between the sexes. Men take no stock in any such heresy. When a man tells a woman that she is an angel and that he looks up to her and worships her, it is one of the lover’s perjuries at which Jove laughs. In reality he doesn’t mean a word of it. The very basic thing on which a man’s love for a woman is built is his sense of superiority to her. He wants to feel stronger than she is, wiser than she is, to be more successful than she is. She must look up to him, revere him, ask his opinion, be guided by his advice.

That is why the clinging-vine type of woman is so appealing to men, and it is why intelligent, big-brained men so often marry morons and are happy and contented with them. Their silly little wives do not understand one word in five they say and are no companions to them, but they satisfy the masculine demand to dominate the woman. When the case is reversed, as it often is, and when the wife is the more intelligent, the stronger character—when the gray mare is the better horse and pulls most of the load—the marriage is invariably unhappy, and the husband almost invariably either openly or secretly hates his wife. His love for her is never strong enough to survive the hurt to his vanity. His sense of inferiority to her keeps his nerves raw, and if he is dependent upon her it turns his very soul to wormwood and gall. I have never known a woman who supported her husband who received any gratitude for it. He would eat her bread, but he did it as a snapping dog that bites the hand that feeds it.

There is nothing that fills a woman’s cup of happiness so full and overflowing as for her husband to achieve a notable success and be great and famous. She glories in being Mrs. Explorer or Mrs. Engineer or Mrs. Banker or Mrs. Author, and loves to shine in the reflected glory. But the deadliest insult you can offer any man is to speak of him as his wife’s husband and call him Mr. Mary Smith, although Mary may have written the book of the year or have performed some achievement that has made the world sit up and take notice of her.

Perhaps all of this is natural. Perhaps this cosmic urge that the male has to dominate the female is something instinctive for which he is not responsible.

But it makes the woman’s course a hard one to steer, for, curiously enough, the weak man is often attracted to the strong woman, and there is something maternal in the strong woman that wants to mother the weak man and makes her feel that he only needs her to take care of him and boost him and show him the way to success.

So the girl who is making a big salary marries the man who is making a small one, and she tries to supply for him the business sense he lacks and to galvanize him into a hustle of which he is incapable, and they live scrappily ever afterward. Yet there is nothing we can do about it as long as nature goes blundering along putting the brains and talents of merchants and bankers and trust presidents into a lot of women’s heads and making plenty of men who would have been wonderful housekeepers and done perfectly lovely embroidery work if only they hadn’t got the wrong sex.

LX
NEW IDEALS FOR OLD

The strangest thing in this age of strange things is the new relationship that is growing up between the sexes. So many of the ideals that have ruled us for centuries have been scrapped and swept into the discard that the boy and girl babies of to-day are virtually born into a new world where few of the conventions that ruled their parents survive. Take the matter of financial independence, for instance. Since the caveman days it has been held that the proper attitude of woman was one of dependence on her lord and master. The woman bore the children and kept the house, and the husband provided the wherewithal to support the family. When a woman had property her husband took possession of it on the day they were married. Virtually every lucrative occupation was barred to women. When a man and a woman went to any place of amusement the man would have been highly insulted if she had offered to pay any part of the cost of the entertainment. Man was the purse bearer, and his lordly gesture indicated that he had the checking account of Mr. Rockefeller and that woman was a dear little sweetie who was not to bother her poor little foolish head over the cost of anything.

To-day the majority of women earn their living before they are married. Financial independence has become so necessary to their happiness that one of the potent sources of domestic discord is the inability of the woman who has had her own pay envelope to do without it and reconcile herself to taking whatever her husband gives her as recompense for her hard work as a poor man’s wife. Also husbands are coming more and more to begrudge spending money on their wives and are demanding oftener and oftener that the wage-earning girls they marry shall keep on with their jobs. Likewise, it is a common thing for the young women who go out with young men to places of amusement to pay their own way and go fifty-fifty on all expenses.

This may be fair enough. Certainly, when men and women work side by side and the woman gets the same salary as the man there is no more reason why he should feed her and buy her theater tickets than why she should buy his. Perhaps it is only logical that when woman fought for and won financial independence she should have to pay the price of her victory. But what I am trying to show is that man’s attitude toward woman as regards money has changed. She has shown that she can make her own living and he lets her do it. Even fathers have now no such sense of responsibility about providing for their daughters as they used to have. Men no longer adopt the gallant “I’ll-pay-your-way” pose. They treat women about money as they would treat another man. Of course, the occupation of wifehood and motherhood is a strenuous one and is all that any woman can be expected to do properly, but it is becoming more and more evident that men are less willing to support their families and that in the future women are going to have to continue to be wage-earners even after they are married.

Another curious shift of masculine thought is about feminine modesty. In the past, no matter what a man’s own life might have been, he demanded unsullied innocence in the woman he married. His ideal was the shrinking violet, the bud with the dew upon it. In these days there are few peaches with the down still left upon them. They have nearly all been manhandled. Girls display their bodies with an abandon that would have made the most hardened woman blush fifty years ago. Debutantes tell stories that would paralyze their grandmothers if they could hear them. Young women think no more of kissing every Tom, Dick and Harry who comes along and in indulging in petting parties and “necking,” than their mothers would have thought of shaking hands and holding a casual conversation. Girls excuse themselves for indulging in these dangerous and degrading practises by saying that unless they do they receive no attention from men. They speak the truth. Men may still theoretically admire what they call “the old-fashioned girl,” but they leave her to spend her evenings with her parents. Few men in these days can hope to marry a girl who has not been kissed and pawed over, and so it is obvious that men are changing their opinions about the desirability of modesty in women and establishing a single standard of conduct for both sexes. That is just, but it does not make for morality or the uplift of humanity.

Men and women both approach marriage in a different spirit. In the back of most young people’s heads as they march to the altar is the thought that if they don’t like it they won’t stick to it. It is an experiment, and they will try anything once, and if it doesn’t come up to what the novelists and poets have press-agented it to be they can always fly to the divorce court. That is one reason why marriage is so often a failure. Neither husband nor wife makes an honest effort to make a success of it. Of course, there are exceptions to all rules. There are husbands who gladly support their families; there are girls who have kept themselves unsullied and their lips virginal; there are men and women who still hold marriage a sacrament. But for the great majority of men and women there are new ideals and a new attitude toward each other. And whether these are better or worse than the old only time can tell.

LXI
WHY DIVORCE IS COMMON

When we hear about a couple getting a divorce on the grounds of incompatibility of temper we instinctively feel that it is too trivial a reason for breaking up a home and we condemn them as poor sports who did not have enough grit to carry on and make the best of their bargain. If it had been something big, now—drunkenness, the drug habit, infidelity—if the husband had been a brute who beat his wife, or the wife a virago, we could have sympathized with them. But just to get a divorce because they didn’t think alike on politics and religion and hadn’t the same taste in pie. Pooh! Quitters. A yellow streak. We’ve no pity for them.

Yet when you come to think of it, is there really anything else in the whole wide world that comes so near to justifying divorce as incompatibility of temper? Is there any other such good reason for a man and woman parting and going their separate ways as the fact that they have not one thought or desire or interest in common? And is there any other torture comparable with having to live in intimate daily contact with a person who continually rubs your fur the wrong way, who gets on your nerves, who rasps your sensibilities and keeps you in a perpetual bad humor? It is a lot easier to forgive an occasional big fault than it is to put up with never-ending petty irritations. The big sinners at least take a day off from their vices now and then, but the little sinners who sin against our habits and ideals and conventions are always on the job. So when you think of this and consider the difficulties there are in the way of every man and woman who get married adjusting themselves to each other, you are not surprised that divorce is so common. You only wonder that it isn’t universal.

Here are two persons of different sexes, doomed by nature to look at everything from different standpoints and to react differently to every situation. Back of them is a different heredity, often a different race. In their veins flow alien currents of blood. They have been brought up with different standards, in different schools of thought. Different habits have been bred in them. They worship different gods and at different altars and eat different dishes.

What marvel that such a couple come to grief on the rocks of incompatibility of temper! The miracle of it is that any of them have the wit and wisdom to steer around it. But the terrible and pathetic thing about it is that in hundreds of these cases in which husbands and wives live a cat-and-dog life and make each other perfectly miserable, or else break their marriage vows, nobody is really to blame. Each is perfectly right from his or her standpoint, only they can’t agree. They can’t adjust themselves to each other. The woman who has been brought up in a happy-go-lucky household, where the only use any one saw for a dollar was to spend it as quickly as possible, where meals were movable feasts that were as likely to happen at one hour as another, is a thorn in the side of a husband who has been trained from his youth up to make a fetich of thrift, order and promptness.

On the other hand, the woman whose mother has brought her up to make a sacred rite of cleanliness and who scrubs the back of every kitchen shelf and regards a chair out of place or ashes on the rug as a high crime and misdemeanor, is fretted into nervous prostration by a husband who never can be taught to wipe his feet on the doormat or kept from mussing up the best sofa cushion.

There are women who die of broken hearts, frozen to death by the coldness of their husbands. They have come from warm-hearted, demonstrative families. They have been accustomed to having a fuss made over them and to seeing their father’s loverlike attentions to their mother, and they think that their husbands do not love them, because they never tell them so. They cannot understand the dumb, repressed temperament that is utterly incapable of showing what it feels. Then there is the gay, pleasure-loving man who likes to dance and dine in restaurants and jazz; the good fellow whom everybody likes and who has holes in his pockets that no wife’s economy can ever sew up. What superhuman wisdom and patience it takes in a woman to keep from nagging him if she has been brought up in an austere family that frowned on all frivolous amusements and whose watchword was duty instead of good times!

Then there is the eternal conflict over little trivial personal habits and ways, over things as small as cooking. Irvin Cobb said once that the Civil War was fought not over secession or slavery but over hot bread and cold bread. Certainly many thirty or forty-year family wars are waged over what strength the breakfast coffee shall be and the use of onions in the soup. And certainly it is no trivial matter for one accustomed to a sophisticated, highly cultured cuisine to have to insult your palate with plain, ignorant, boiled food because the partner of your bosom has had his or her early education in eating neglected. Probably no woman who has been reared in the belief that one’s good clothes should be kept for company and that any sort of old messy duds were good enough for home consumption can realize the disgust she inspires in her husband’s breast when she comes down to breakfast in a boudoir cap and a soiled kimono and no complexion if he is of the fastidious sort to whom slovenliness is a mortal sin.

These little things—the niceties of life that one has been taught to observe and the other hasn’t, the order and thrift one has been bred to and the other hasn’t, the difference in point of view, in taste, in habit—make the inevitable friction between husbands and wives which is at the bottom of almost every divorce. And when you think how hard it is to give up our old opinions and ways of doing things, the wonder is that so many persons are able to do it and that so many couples do adjust themselves to each other and get along in reasonable peace and harmony.

LXII
THE CHILDREN PAY

No disinterested outsider ever observes the spats in which so many husbands and wives continually engage without realizing that they quarrel because they enjoy doing so. It is an indoor sport out of which they get a morbid thrill. Domestic life has become dull and monotonous to them. They have nothing new and interesting to say to each other, and so one or the other starts something by making a remark that he or she knows is the fighting word that will inevitably precipitate a scrimmage. And then they go to it, hammer and tongs. It is their way of putting pep into a pepless day, for they know the danger they are running, and the very fact that they are risking their whole life’s happiness crisps their nerves, as going over the top did the soldiers in the war. Besides which they get a strange and savage joy out of stabbing with cruel words and in wounding and being wounded by the ones they love and who love them.

It is because married couples love a fight for the fight’s sake that so many homes are nothing but a battlefield on which a perpetual warfare goes on. Otherwise the dove of peace would roost on the roof of many a household to which the black flag is now nailed. For it is folly to say that the average husband and wife who are forever engaged in an acrimonious debate over every trifle that comes up could not get along with each other if they desired to do so. They get along with other persons. They make allowance for the prejudices and faults of others. They permit other persons to differ from them on matters of opinion and taste. They sidestep other persons’ peculiarities. They control their tempers and their tongues when they are dealing with others. They are tactful and diplomatic in handling other persons. No doctor would ever have another patient, no merchant another customer, no man could hold his job if he was as irritable, as grouchy, as high tempered abroad as many a man is at home, and if he said the insulting things to other persons that he says to his wife. No woman would ever be invited to another bridge party or elected president of the sewing society if she were as much of a spitfire in public as many a woman is in private, and if she said the nasty things to others that she says to her husband.

Now, the rules for keeping the peace are the same everywhere, and both men and women are familiar with them. Every man knows that there isn’t a woman living that he can’t make eat out of his hand by showing her a few attentions, a little tenderness and consideration and paying her a few compliments. Every woman knows that there isn’t a man that she can’t jolly along the way she wants him to go and who does not respond to judiciously applied salve. So when husbands and wives, who know perfectly well how to work each other without friction, deliberately and with malice aforethought rub each other the wrong way, it is obviously because they enjoy their daily dozen fracases and find fun in seeing the fur fly. If that were the end of it, we might well shrug our shoulders and, while wondering at their taste, leave them to take their pleasure as they saw fit in the cruel pastime of baiting each other. But, unfortunately, the family spat is not the innocent diversion that husbands and wives appear to think it is, nor does it end when the husband puts on his hat and bangs the door behind him and goes downtown, and the wife wipes away a tear or two and goes about her daily tasks.

The children are the real victims in these family fights. It is they who stumble from the domestic battleground with shattered nerves, with torn and bleeding spirits and souls, with maimed and deformed characters. All of us have known children who have taken to the streets almost as soon as they could walk to escape homes that were full of bickering and discord. We have seen how little control the fathers and mothers who could not control their own tempers had over their children, and we have not wondered when truant officers tell us that nine-tenths of the wayward girls and hoodlum boys are the children of divorced parents, or else, of parents who did not get along together. Now comes a great psychiatrist who asserts that he has never known an instance of nervous breakdown in the children of happily married parents who were brought up in a peaceful home.

Read that over again. Memorize it, you fathers and mothers who begin the day by having a row at the breakfast table because the coffee isn’t just as you like it or the toast is burnt or you neglected to send up the coal yesterday and forgot to leave the money for the milkman. You think it is of no consequence because your wife knows you don’t mean half of what you say and she is fighting back more from force of habit than anything else. But neither one of you gives a thought to the children who are listening to it all, to the children who are learning to regard you with contempt, who are having all their illusions shattered; whom you are teaching to be bitter and misanthropic, with no faith in anything beautiful or fine. You do not realize that you may not only be giving them a warp in character that will bar them from success in life, but that you may be actually dooming them to a breakdown that will make them wrecks in body and mind.

Isn’t that a pretty high price to pay for the pleasure of quarreling? And isn’t it a cruelly unfair thing to force your children to settle your score? For the sake of the children you brought into the world and for whom you are responsible, isn’t it worth while to deny yourself the pleasure of finding fault with your husband or wife and saying all the mean, acrimonious things you can think of? No use in saying that you can’t get along together. You can, if you want to. You get along with other persons.

LXIII
THE LEARNED PROFESSION OF HOME-MAKING

No complaint is more general—possibly no belief is more prevalent among women—than that a woman of intelligence wastes her energies and her abilities in being merely a housekeeper. Following the domestic arts is a despised calling, held in such contempt by the majority of women that they never take the trouble to achieve success in it; and yet there is no other occupation under the sun that requires so many and such varied talents as does the learned profession of home-making. Did you ever think what a woman must be in order to create and carry on a happy and prosperous home?

She must be a financier. There can be no peace and pleasure in a home where the wolf is always howling under the window and the bill collector hammering on the door. There are, of course, a few men in every community who are such gifted money-makers that they can annex more coin than any woman can spend, but for the great mass of ordinary, industrious, hard-working humanity the wife settles the financial status of the family. It is her ability to handle money, her knowledge of where to spend and where to economize, her knack of making a dollar buy a hundred and five cents’ worth and get a blue trading stamp thrown in to boot, that is at the foundation of every prosperous home. We don’t hear anything about it, because the woman doesn’t know herself how awfully clever she is, but the majority of women in this country are doing marvels of financiering in the way they make both ends meet in their housekeeping allowance, and keep up appearances, that entitle them to qualify in the Rockefeller class.

She must be a general.

She must know how to command. She must know how to set all the multitudinous wheels of household machinery in motion and be able to keep them moving without friction. She must be able to enforce obedience, inspire enthusiasm, plan campaigns, forestall her enemy, be fertile in expedient and subtle in strategy. Any woman who maintains a comfortable and well-ordered home, the kind of a house that we like to visit, and who raises a nice family and marries her daughters off well could give the commander-in-chief of the army points on generalship.

She must be a diplomat. The husband question, the children question and the servant question are not to be handled without gloves. There is no hour of the day that she is not called upon to deal with some problem that requires the finesse of a Talleyrand. She must be able, if the white-winged dove of peace is to brood over the home nest, to deal with her husband’s prejudices and circumvent them so delicately that he will never know that he is being induced to do the thing that he swore he would never, never do. She must assert her authority over the growing boy with such cunning that he does not perceive that her fine Italian hand is on the check rein holding him tight and steady. She must be able, without the girls dreaming that she does it, to insinuate a doubt, drop a word of ridicule, imply an impossibility that will keep her daughters out of entangling alliances and steer them toward the reciprocally profitable permanent treaties they should make.

Above all, she must be able to see most when she is apparently stone blind; hear everything when she seems to be as deaf as the adder of the Scriptures; to be most on guard when she looks to be sleeping at her post, and to be most chaperoning her daughters when the onlooker and the girls themselves would swear that she was most giving them their liberty.

She must know how to tread very softly if she keeps off the corns of her servants, for whether a woman is agreeable or disagreeable in the home her children are bound to stay there with her, but it is the blessed privilege of Mary Ann and Bridget and eke of Hulda and Dinah that they can pack their trunks and go. Only the very quintessence of diplomacy renders a mistress persona grata to the kitchen, and the woman who preserves friendly relations with that must understand the Alpha and Omega of how to make a jolly cover the discipline of a martinet. Any woman who, when she is fifty years old, has a husband who thinks her a Solomon in petticoats, grown children who quote mother’s opinion, and a cook who has been with her five years is fitted to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of St. James’s, and nothing but the stupidity of a nation that believes that breeches and brains are synonymous terms keeps her out of the job.

She must be an artist.

It is the woman’s province to create the beauty of the home. This is true whether it is the palace of the millionaire or the three-room flat of the day laborer. Every room that she arranges is a picture, just as much as if she painted a Dutch interior on canvas.

She must be a poet.

A home is not merely a place of shelter and food—it is a thing no less of the spirit and soul—and a woman must put into it the passion of her heart and the joy of creating just as truly as a poet must put them into his song. To make a home that is beautiful, that breathes the spirit of home, that is a haven of peace and rest to those who live in it and that is a glimpse of Paradise to the stranger who is bidden within its gates is a profession the most exacting in which any woman can engage and the one that calls for the greatest number of talents. Also it is the most profitable, for within it are made the men and women who go forth to bless the world. And the wonder of wonders is that so many just plain ordinary women are doing it, and the greatest marvel of all is that they do not realize what a glorious thing they are doing!

LXIV
A FATHER’S INFLUENCE

There is no subject under the sun of which men take such a distorted view as they do of a mother’s influence. Romancers have glorified it, poets have idealized it, musicians have sung it until men have honestly come to think that mothers have a practical monopoly of their children and the sole duty and privilege of shaping their lives. Even fathers seem to think that fathers count for nothing and that all they are good for is paying the bills. In the family circle they take a back seat and let mother run the show. It is Mother’s Day that is celebrated with pomp and flowers and beating the cymbals. Nobody notices Father’s Day—perhaps because the first of the month is always Father’s Day and it comes around so often.

No one would belittle mother’s influence. For good or evil it is all powerful. But it is all powerful because father is so often too stupid or too lazy or too careless or too much absorbed in his business to do his duty to his children by helping to mold their characters. He dodges his responsibility. He passes the buck to mother and salves his conscience with a platitude about a mother’s sacred influence, which in his innermost self he recognizes for the hokum it is. For mother’s influence does not always work for righteousness. Motherhood works no miracles. Bearing a baby does not put brains and wisdom in a hen-minded woman’s head. It does not give a shallow woman depth. It does not make a narrow, prejudiced woman broad and tolerant. It does not make a fool woman wise.

Yet all around us we see men who would not trust their wives’ judgment about anything else on earth, turning over to them their children’s immortal souls. They know their wives to be silly and ignorant—without vision, without the ability to see or understand anything beyond their own little circle—yet they let these morons shape their children’s lives. They let them form their children’s ideals and set their standards. They let them decide on the schools their children shall attend, the churches they shall join, the people with whom they associate.

Yet the very men who trust their children to weak and incompetent and unintelligent wives to rear would not dream of permitting a weak, incompetent, unintelligent partner to run their business. They are too well aware of the value of their personal advice and supervision and of the need of their strong and expert hands on the wheel. Men blindly subscribe to the faith that a mother’s influence is bound to be good, especially upon her daughters, yet a moment’s thought would show them how fallacious such a belief is.

A woman can only give out what she has. She can only try to make her daughters what she is. And unless a man wants his daughters to be just the sort of woman their mother is, he cannot safely leave them in her hands.

It is true that there are not many women who deliberately bring up their girls to be immoral and start their feet on the downward path. But there are thousands upon thousands of mothers whose influence upon their daughters is vicious, because they inculcate in them their own low ideals of honor and honesty. They teach them by precept and example to evade every duty of wifehood and motherhood, and from their very infancy up they instil into them a greed and selfishness that wrecks the happiness of all who come in contact with them. Such are the mothers who teach their daughters how to lie and cheat, how to buy on credit the finery they cannot afford, how to kill a man with their extravagance. Such mothers are those whose favorite maxim is that what a husband doesn’t know doesn’t hurt him. Such a mother is the one who, not long ago, I heard say to her young daughter who was getting married: “Don’t tie yourself down with babies. Go about and amuse yourself and have a good time, and if your husband doesn’t like it he can lump it.”

When a man has that kind of a wife—and no man can be so afflicted without knowing it—he does a criminal thing when he leaves his girls to their mother’s influence. It is his bounden duty to use his influence to correct hers as far as possible. Little as men seem to realize it, children nearly always listen with far more respect to what their fathers say than they do to what their mothers say. For the child knows intuitively that the father has had a broader experience of life than the mother has. It knows that the father goes out into the world and does battle with it every day and that he knows from experience the things about which mother vaguely theorizes. It knows that father knows the rules and how to play the game.

Hence when a man really makes any attempt to develop his children’s characters he finds them as clay in his hands, ready to respond to his slightest touch. It is only when father merely uses his influence as a veto power that it is negligible. That a boy needs his father’s hand in directing and controlling him at the critical time of his life and a father’s wisdom to steer him along the right course is universally recognized, but I often think that a girl needs it even more. For a girl needs to be taught the things that life teaches a man. She needs to be taught to be straightforward and honest and to live up to her contracts, that she must give as well as take in life and that she must have the courage and the grit to carry on when things are hard instead of turning quitter and to make the best of a bad bargain. Many a divorce would have been avoided and many a home that is now broken up, kept intact if a father’s influence over his little girl had made her a good sport, instead of mother’s influence developing a yellow streak in her.

A mother’s influence is a great thing, but it needs to be backed up by father’s. That is why God gave every child two parents instead of one.

LXV
THE RICHES OF POOR CHILDREN

The bitterest cry of poor people is that they have nothing to give their children. The fathers and mothers who cannot buy imported finery for their girls or sports-model cars for their boys and send them off to expensive colleges and fill their pockets with money feel that they have come empty-handed to their children and have nothing to give them. Yet the poorest man and woman who bend above a cradle have it in their power to bestow upon their babe treasures so great that their worth cannot be computed in dollars and cents, and that will bring the child more pleasure and happiness in life than they could purchase with all the wealth of the Rothschilds. For there is no price tag on the most precious things in the world. They are equally free to prince and pauper, and more often the beggar gets them than the millionaire does.

For example, there is love—a close, intimate, personal association—and tenderness and understanding. Poor parents can more easily give to their children than the wealthy can. And the child that has them is rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and the child that has them not is poverty-stricken, although it has all else besides. The mother who rocks her baby to sleep on her breast, whose tender arms are always outstretched to gather her youngsters to her heart, who is never too tired or too busy to listen to childish confidences, who surrounds her little ones with a brooding atmosphere of affection,—gives to her children far more than does the rich mother who gives her children nurses and governesses and pony carts and fine clothes and costly playthings but who does not give them herself; who bestows on them everything but the things that a child wants most and needs most—mother love and tenderness, the real mother touch.

Not long ago a very rich young man figured in a disgraceful scandal, and the one excuse offered in his defense was that his mother was dead and his father had never given him anything except money. He had never had any affection bestowed upon him. He had had no parental guidance. When a little lad he had been put in a school and kept there without even being visited by any one who loved him, without even going home for vacations. He had been just a pitiful little millionaire waif for whom nobody cared. The lot of such a child is infinitely worse than that of the one whose parents are in such humble circumstances that they can give it perhaps only the plainest of food and clothes, but who do give it a real home that is full of close, warm family life. The fathers and mothers to whom children are grateful and whose memories they revere are not those who bequeath them great fortunes, but those who leave them the memory of a love and understanding that never failed and of a childhood that was made sweet by their parents’ cherishing.

No matter how poor you are, you can give your children love and companionship and the privilege of growing up in a peaceful and cheerful home, and that is something that few rich parents can give their children.

Another gift that you can make your children is that of teaching them how to read. When you do that you really don’t need to do much more for them, because you have put a magic coin in their hands that will buy them entrance into all the doors of delight and open to them all of the portals of romance. No one who loves to read can ever be bored or lonely. He or she has only to open a book, and, presto, he or she has for company all of the wit and wisdom of the ages. Gay adventures, beautiful ladies and gallant gentlemen beckon, and one has only to follow them into realms of enchantment. All of interest, all that informs, that thrills, that amuses, is the property of the reader. But, reading does not always come by nature, as Dogberry thought it did. Often it has to be acquired by art, but any child can be taught to like to read; it can be given the reading habit, and no other gift can possibly be bestowed upon it that is half so valuable or that will bring it in such happiness or that will be such an ark of refuge to it in times of trouble.

Another gift that the poorest parents can make to their children is to teach them how to see. Most persons go through the world as blind as bats. They never see anything that isn’t directly under their noses, and thereby they miss half of the fun and pleasure in living. There are men and women to whom a sunset is just a phenomenon of nature that happens every day; to whom a crowd is just a jam of people; who get nothing out of travel but inconvenience and missing the particular kind of breakfast food they prefer, and who loathe rain because they get their feet wet and hate snow because it is messy. And there are other men and women who see the glory of God in every flaming sunset; who thrill to the finger tips at the drama they see enacted in every crowd; to whom travel opens up a new world; to whom every rain is a symphony and every snowstorm a poem.

Which of these get the most out of life—those who see or those who are blind; those who can get pleasure out of little things or those who are too dull and dumb to amuse themselves; those who are sensitive to every beauty in nature, who appreciate music and art and literature, who get the last flavor out of good cooking, or those who find everything flat and stale and uninteresting because they have never been taught to see the under side of things?

Finally, the poorest parents can teach their children that brave attitude toward life without which all the balance is cinders, ashes, and dust. For disappointments and trouble come to us all, and it is only those who have been taught how to make the best of their bad bargains, how to laugh at misfortune and mock at fate, who achieve any real happiness in life. So cheer up, you parents who complain that you have nothing to give your children. You can give them love. You can teach them to read and to see things. You can give them a brave heart. These gifts are worth more than money. And nobody can take them away from those who have them.

LXVI
A MAN’S RIGHT TO HIS HOME

It is a matter of continual wonder to me that women do not realize how unjustly they treat their husbands about their homes. Of course, a woman’s home is her castle and all that, and it is right and proper that she should be the ruler of it. Moreover, inasmuch as the average man is in his home only a very few of his waking hours, while his wife spends practically all of her time in it, it is more important that it should come up to her ideal and fire her fancy than his. She should have the right of choice in selecting the neighborhood she desires to live in, because she has to know the people next door and look across the street all day, and he doesn’t. Nor should any mere husband presume to dictate about the number, size, and arrangements of the closets in a house that is going to be his wife’s workshop. Nor should a man interfere with his wife’s taste in decoration, no matter how much it runs to putting ruffled petticoats on the furniture and installing forests of floor lamps, for having a home dolled up as she wants it, fills a woman with a great and exceeding peace and joy, and no good husband should withhold this pleasure from his wife.

But all that does not give the wife the right to monopolize the home and use it for her sole behoof and benefit, as so many women think it does. The man who pays the freight, the man who buys the house and who supports it, should have a few poor, simple privileges in it which even a wife should recognize and respect. He should at least, in all common fairness, have the status of a star boarder in the home his money keeps a going concern. He seldom does, however. There is not one home in a thousand where the man of the house has even a room of his own which he can furnish in accordance with his own taste and where he can mess around as much as he likes.

I have known many men who tried to establish dens for themselves in their houses, but before they got fairly settled, with their collections of stamps or fishing rods or stuffed animals or what-not disposed around them, their wives decided that it would be just the place for a sewing room or the nursery. Three hooks in a closet and a couple of drawers in a chiffonier are about all most men get for their private use in their homes, and at that they generally find that their wives and daughters have superimposed feminine fripperies over their best suits and parked their silk stockings on top of their shirts. So universal is the feeling among women they have a right to the entire house that when a wife does concede an easy chair and a reading lamp to her husband she boasts of it loudly and calls everybody’s attention to her unusual and generous gesture, whereat all marvel. And even her husband himself puffs out his chest and feels that he is a pampered household pet.

Why women should feel that they have an exclusive right to exercise the hospitality of the home nobody knows, but they do. If you will observe you will see that in most homes it is the wife’s family who are perpetually billeted in the spare bedroom, while the husband’s family makes few and occasional visits. You will also observe that there are ten men who have their mothers-in-law living with them to one man whose mother resides under his roof. Any wife would think it very mean in him if her husband did not extend a cordial welcome to Aunt Sally and Cousin Sue when they were invited for a visit and if he wasn’t willing to have her pretty young sister come and stay indefinitely in town with them so as to have the benefits of the city. And she expects him to register great joy when her mother telegraphs that she is coming for a month or two.

But it is another pair of sleeves when it comes to a husband’s relatives, and there are precious few men who would dare to dump a bunch of their kinspeople on their wives. Many a man is afraid to ask even his own mother to come to see him. The average husband would fall dead with surprise if his wife ever intimated to him that she considered the fact that he paid for the rent and food and light and heat and general upkeep of the home gave him just as much right to have his family stay with them as she had to have hers.

As to the friends who come to the house, the wife considers it her prerogative to settle that little matter by herself and thinks that her husband has nothing to do with it. She spreads the mat with “Welcome” on it for those she likes and slams and bolts the door in the faces of those she doesn’t fancy. And she practically never fancies her husband’s old friends. So the man who had looked forward to having his old friends in his new home, who had dreamed of long talks with Tom by his fireside and to having Bob, who was closer than a brother, drop in at any time for pot-luck finds, somehow, not only that they do not come, but that he is afraid to ask them to come. Wives are always complaining that their husbands are not willing to stay at home. Perhaps the remedy is making the home a democracy instead of an autocracy. If men had more rights and privileges at home they might like staying in it better.

LXVII
DEVOURING FRIENDS

“One of the greatest pests in the world is what I call the devouring friend,” said a woman the other day. “She is a bloodthirsty cannibal who gobbles you up alive, and you have no way of protecting yourself against her, because the sacred name of friendship bars the use of all the lethal weapons that you can use in defending yourself against other bores and social nuisances.

“Of course, the common or garden variety of devouring friend is the one who literally eats you out of house and home. She is a self-invited guest who drops you a little note saying that she is passing through your city or that she has to have a little dental work done or wants to consult a doctor or do some shopping, and she does so pine to see her darling Susan and talk over old times, and will it be convenient for her to come and spend a few days with you? All of which being translated simply means that she desires to graft a hotel bill off you.

“Anyway, she comes and camps in your spare room by the week, because she always manages to string out the dental work or the appointments with the doctor or the milliner. She should worry. For she is having a good time at no expense. Furthermore, by hints and insinuations she inveigles your husband into taking her to places of amusement that you have not felt that you could afford even when there were only two of you to pay for. And she runs your grocery bill up to the skies because she develops a taste for the most expensive food. And as you see her calmly consuming the price of your new dress you know exactly how a cornfield feels when a swarm of seven-year locusts settles down on it and goes into action.

“Then there are the devouring friends who eat up your time. I am a busy woman. I cannot afford to waste a minute. Unfortunately for me, I have a number of women friends who are rich and whose principal occupation in life is killing time. Now, these women know perfectly well that I not only do all of my own housework but that I make my children’s clothes and that if they kill a morning for me they upset my whole schedule and make my work pile up upon me so that my labor is twice as hard.

“But does that keep them from interrupting me? Lord, no. Every time Maud has a spat with her mother-in-law she will drop over and spend a whole morning giving me all the harrowing details. Every time Lulu’s husband gives her a new limousine I have to waste hours of my valuable time listening to a minute description of all its splendor. Every time Sallie and Susie want to be sympathized with or want to brag about their children they ruin the heart of a day’s work for me by backing me up against a wall and making me listen. And a dozen times a day I am interrupted by women who call me up over the telephone to hold long and fruitless conversations about nothing.

“Yet there is no possible way to protect my precious time against these friends who eat it up. They are all charming women. They like me and I like them. I want to retain their friendship, so I cannot shut my door in their faces when they come to see me. I can’t ask them to leave when they stay too long. I can’t ring off when they call me over the telephone. I can’t even say ‘damn’ aloud, no matter how much I am thinking it. But I know what the cynic meant when he said that if God would save him from his friends he would protect himself from his enemies.

“Then there are the devouring friends who swallow up all of your home life. My husband’s business is such that he has only one or two evenings at home a week. We would like to have these to ourselves to keep up our acquaintance or to go out on a little spree together. We have proclaimed this fact loudly and long to our friends and we refuse every invitation that it is possible to get out of for those two sacred occasions. But it doesn’t do a particle of good.

“Being an unusually charming and entertaining individual, my husband is regarded by my friends as a social tidbit—a particularly savory hors d’œuvre, as it were—and they gobble up our evenings together without the slightest compunction. If we won’t go to them, all right. They will come to us. So just about the time we are settling down for a real heart-to-heart talk, here come the Smiths to pass a pleasant evening with us, or the Joneses descend upon us and bear us off, shrieking and protesting, to listen to their new radio, or the Thompsons telephone that they are just coming over for a game of bridge.

“And there are the other devouring friends who nibble away at our independence like a mouse at a cheese, until some day we suddenly wake up to the fact that our freedom is all gone. We haven’t a vestige of liberty left. We dare not give a party and leave them out. We have to explain to them everything we do and tag meekly along in their footsteps. And there are other devouring friends who gnaw constantly on our sympathies by telling us all of their troubles and making us bear their burdens for them. They are ghouls who make us feed them our hearts to satisfy their morbid appetite for pity. Perhaps there is no way to get rid of devouring friends, but it certainly would add to the pleasures of life if we could swat them as we do other household pests.”

LXVIII
THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS

What is the secret of happiness? I once asked Mary Anderson this question and she replied: “To find out what you want of life, and then to have the courage to take it. I wanted quiet, seclusion, home and husband and children, the ordinary domestic life of woman,” she went on. “I had the courage to leave the stage at the very height of my career. And I have had the courage to refuse every offer to go back, no matter how dazzling it was. I have also had the courage to stay in my sleepy little village and refuse to let myself be drawn into the brilliant whirl of London society. I have been happy because I knew what I wanted, and I have been brave enough to take it in spite of all temptations to be led into doing the things that I did not want to do.”

Undoubtedly this is one of the answers to the great riddle that we are always asking and that so few solve. A great many people are unhappy because they do not really know what they want. They have no clear vision of the thing they are seeking. They are torn between conflicting desires and never settle down to any one thing, and find contentment and peace in that. You see this exemplified in the men who are always changing from one occupation to another, and who work with their minds on their golf and play golf with their minds on their work. You see it in the women who are fretful and peevish wives and mothers, complaining of the burdens of domesticity and feeling that they have missed happiness in not following some career, and in the women who have followed careers and who are always bemoaning their loneliness because they have no families. Yet how seldom do the disgruntled, who lament their fate in life so loudly, have the courage to face about and take the road that they at least believe leads to happiness! We behold so many idle tears that we are inclined to believe there are vast numbers of human beings who get a kind of morbid pleasure out of misery.

But what is the secret of happiness? I give four guesses at the conundrum. The first is work, to keep so busy that we do not have leisure to think whether we are happy or not. There is no other pleasure comparable to the clean joy of being swallowed up in some useful, constructive work that calls forth every power of mind and body. Your own job, that you do competently, has for you a never-failing interest, a perpetual thrill that nothing else in the world can give. Only brainless idiots are content to loaf. Intelligent, thinking men and women must keep busy in order to be happy.

My second guess is that happiness is the bird in the hand and not the bird in the bush. If we are ever to be happy we must be happy now at the present moment. We cannot put it off until to-morrow. You are always hearing people say that they are going to do this and that when they get rich, that they are going to travel when they are old, they are going to play, they are going to take up old acquaintances, they are going to enjoy themselves five, ten, twenty years hence. But when the time comes that they have set to be happy in, they find that they have lost their capacity for enjoyment. Those who have inched and pinched and sweated every penny trying to accumulate a fortune have formed such a habit of parsimony that it is agony to them to spend money. Those who have denied themselves too much have lost all desire. Those who have stayed at home too long have become such a fixture on Main Street that they are lonesome and homesick everywhere else.

So the happy men and women are those who take the goods the gods provide each hour. They make a reasonable provision against the rainy day, and then they indulge themselves in the good clothes, the pretty home, the comfortable car, the palatable food, the little trips that are within their reach. They do not put off every pleasure until some mythical, problematic day, when they will be able to live in a palace and have a Rolls-Royce and Paris clothes and when they will be too old and rheumatic and set in their ways to want to do anything but sit by the fire in their own familiar chair. Never was there sounder philosophy conveyed than in the old comic opera ditty which said, “I want what I want when I want it,” and if we don’t take it then, it is dust and ashes in our teeth.

Happiness consists in simple things. We are always envying the rich and great, and think how happy they must be, but we might well pity them, for they have far more sources of sorrow than we have. Beyond a modest competence, riches are a burden, and money can become a curse that blights every natural joy. The millionaire is cut off from the greatest of all happiness—that of knowing himself loved for himself alone. He suspects the motive of every friend, he does not even trust the woman he marries, and he knows his wealth to be a blight upon his children. The real source of happiness is in enjoying simple things—a gorgeous sunset, a beautiful landscape, a clever book, a good dinner, the talk of a friend, the unfaltering love of husband or wife, a baby’s arms around your neck, a fine son and daughter filling you with pride and joy. These have no price tag on them. They may belong just as much to the poor man as the rich man. Indeed, they oftener do.

Finally, remember the song, “I Want to Be Happy, but I Can’t Be Happy Till I Make You Happy, Too.” In unselfishness, in doing good to others—that is the real answer to the secret of how to be happy.

LXIX
PREPAREDNESS FOR OLD AGE

What are you storing up for your old age? Are you laying up any money against the time when you will be old and feeble and no longer able to work? The hour will strike for you, as it does for others, when your earning powers will be gone. Your hands will be too stiff and clumsy to keep on with their accustomed task. Your mind will be too slow to go the pace in the fierce competition in the commercial world. If you are an employee, you will lose your job. If you are a business man, you will find that your trade has somehow drifted away from you. If you are a professional man, you will be superseded by the new men whose stars are just rising on the horizon.

Nothing that you can do will alter these conditions. No miracle will save you from the common fate of all who grow old. But if you have saved up enough money to make you independent, it will be merely a matter of mild regret to you. If, however, you have laid up nothing for the rainy day that is bound to come to you, it will be a tragedy that you will pray death to end.

For in all the world there are no people so piteous and forlorn as those who are forced to eat the bitter bread of dependence in their old age, and find how steep are the stairs of another man’s house. Wherever they go they know themselves unwelcome. Wherever they are, they feel themselves a burden. There is no humiliation of the spirit they are not forced to endure. Their hearts are scarred all over with the stabs from cruel and callous speeches.

In youth money is a convenience, an aid to pleasure. In age it is an absolute necessity, for when we are old we have to buy even consideration and politeness from those about us. This is true even in the households of our own children, for between the father and mother who are able to pay their own way and are the source of a never-ending flow of gifts and treats, and the father and mother who must be supported is a great gulf fixed. It is the difference between having the place of honor and the back seat; between being listened to with respect and having one’s opinions derided; between having one’s little peculiarities catered to as interesting characteristics and being snubbed for one’s old-fashioned ways.

Nor is this as unfeeling and hard-boiled as it seems. The average young couple has all it can do, in these times of the high cost of living, to provide for itself and the children, and it makes the burden crushing to have to add the extra weight of the support of the old people of the families.

The fate of the dependent old is so terrible that it is a marvel that it does not frighten every one into trying to provide against it. Yet it was recently stated in a journal of statistics that 80 per cent of the men and women more than sixty years of age were dependent either upon their children or upon public charity. Don’t let this misfortune befall you. Guard against it. Begin systematic saving while you are young, so that when you are old you will at least have the comfort of being independent.

Are you laying up affection for your old age? Most of us have a curious and naïve belief in what we call “natural affection.” We befool ourselves into thinking that people must love us because they stand in a certain relationship to us and because there are blood ties between us. Never was there a more fallacious theory. There is, to be sure, the mother’s passion for the child she has borne and the instinctive clinging of the child to its mother while it is young and helpless, but that is all. It doesn’t follow as a matter of course that grown-up men and women love their parents just because they are their parents. As a matter of fact, they don’t, unless the father and mother have won their love by years of tenderness and understanding and sympathy. You can’t be hard and tyrannical and selfish and stingy with your children and expect them to love you because it is their duty to do so. If you want your children to love you when you are old, you have to begin winning their hearts when they are in the cradle.

Have you laid up a good supply of friendship for your old age? No complaint is heard more often from the old than that they are lonely. Few come to see them. They are seldom asked out. No one sends them flowers when they are sick. They are neglected and they crave the little attentions that we all like and yearn for the society of their fellow creatures. Now, when old people are lonely, it is always their own fault. It is because they have neglected to lay up any friendships for the sere and yellow days when they have no longer the power to attract people to them.

They have gone their selfish way through life, sufficient unto themselves in their youth. They have never held out a helping hand to those in need. They have never wept with those who wept and rejoiced with those who rejoiced. They have not bothered to write notes of condolence or congratulation. They have never visited the sick and afflicted. They have never spent an hour listening to an old person’s garrulous talk, and so, when they get old, they are repaid in the same coin.

Are you laying up any mental riches for your old age? I know an old lady so feeble that she cannot stir from her chair, and whose eyes have failed so that she cannot tell day from night, and who is so deaf that she cannot be read to, but who passes her days delightfully reciting to herself whole cantos of Scott and Byron and recalling word for word chapters of Dickens and Thackeray and Miss Austen. Her mind to her a kingdom is, in which she finds entertainment and amusement. Will you be amused or bored when you are in your nineties and have nothing but your own society? I know another woman, middle-aged, who is deliberately laying up a treasure of memories of travel to solace her in her old age. She will never know a dull moment, for she will have something to think about besides her rheumatism and her diet when she sits alone in the twilight of life.

Old age comes to us all. Don’t let it find you empty-handed or empty-minded. Thus shall you make it a time of happiness instead of torment.

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Transcriber’s Notes

pg 58 Changed: | which are resonsible for more real
to: | which are responsible for more real
pg 61 Changed: | you happen to be born in a certain relationshp
to: | you happen to be born in a certain relationship
pg 71 Changed: | any particular trade or profesion
to: | any particular trade or profession
pg 101 Changed: | earn her own living as a “poor working women.”
to: | earn her own living as a “poor working woman.”
pg 105 Changed: | so far be it from me to abridge
to: | so far be it for me to abridge
pg 150 Changed: | life better than than that of the successful
to: | life better than that of the successful
pg 179 Changed: | he will be filled fell of pep and energy
to: | he will be filled full of pep and energy
pg 179 Changed: | discovery that somewhow the mysterious something
to: | discovery that somehow the mysterious something
pg 188 Changed: | she is not likely to tarnish your deal.
to: | she is not likely to tarnish your ideal.
pg 217 Changed: | as many men starving for affection as there are woman.
to: | as many men starving for affection as there are women.
pg 218 Changed: | reward depends altogther on his wife’s attitude
to: | reward depends altogether on his wife’s attitude
pg 221 Changed: | their purpose when they falter and waiver
to: | their purpose when they falter and waver

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Table of Contents

Dorothy Dix—Her Book

A Foreword by Richard Duffy

Introduction

- MY PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

I HOW A HUSBAND LIKES TO BE TREATED
II CHARM
III THE ORDINARY WOMAN
IV TEACH THE CHILDREN TO LOVE FATHER
V STRIKE A BALANCE WITH MATRIMONY
VI JEALOUSY
VII HAVE A GOAL
VIII THE GOAT FAMILY
IX SPOILING A WIFE
X THE ABSENCE CURE FOR FAMILY ILLS
XI THE DEADLY RIVAL
XII LEARN A TRADE, GIRLS
XIII TRIAL DIVORCE
XIV MARRY THE MAN YOU LOVE
XV ARE YOU GOOD COMPANY FOR YOURSELF?
XVI KEEPING YOUNG
XVII GOSSIP, THE POLICEMAN
XVIII THE LUCKY WORKING WOMAN
XIX AN INDOOR SPORT
XX SHOULD WOMEN TELL?
XXI DOMESTIC BOREDOM
XXII TO MARRY OR NOT TO MARRY?
XXIII WOMAN’S GREATEST GIFT
XXIV GRAFTING ON THE OLD FOLKS
XXV ARE YOU A GOOD FATHER?
XXVI THE MORAL MUSCLES OF YOUR CHILDREN
XXVII THE MOTHER-IN-LAW
XXVIII WHY OUR FAMILIES RILE US
XXIX OUR LIVES ARE WHAT WE MAKE THEM
XXX HUSBAND LOSERS
XXXI MARTHA OR MARY?
XXXII THE T. B. M. AT HOME

XXXIII DON’T BE AFRAID TO LET YOUR HUSBAND SEE YOU LOVE HIM

XXXIV QUEER THINGS ABOUT MARRIAGE
XXXV HUSBANDS—THE LIVING CONUNDRUM
XXXVI THE POWER OF SUGGESTION
XXXVII WOMAN’S MISSIONARY OPPORTUNITY
XXXVIII HOW TO BE A GOOD HUSBAND
XXXIX GIVING CHILDREN ADVANTAGES
XL SELL YOURSELF TO YOUR CHILDREN
XLI TAKING HUSBANDS “AS IS”
XLII BEING A GOOD WIFE
XLIII INVALIDISM A GRAFT
XLIV SELFISHNESS MADE TO ORDER
XLV SELF-CONTROL
XLVI OLD FATHERS AND NEW DAUGHTERS
XLVII LOSING A WIFE’S LOVE
XLVIII THE LURE OF THE MARRIED MAN
XLIX FORGET IT
L LOST LOVE
LI THE SHOW WEDDING
LII WHEN YOUR CHILDREN ARE GLAD YOU DIE
LIII WHAT PRICE PLEASURE?
LIV THE IDEAL MOTHER
LV HOW TO CATCH A WIFE
LVI DANGEROUS GIRLS
LVII WHEN A GIRL LOVES A MAN
LVIII MARRIAGE LESSONS
LIX THE SUPERIOR BUSINESS WOMAN
LX NEW IDEALS FOR OLD
LXI WHY DIVORCE IS COMMON
LXII THE CHILDREN PAY
LXIII THE LEARNED PROFESSION OF HOME-MAKING
LXIV A FATHER’S INFLUENCE
LXV THE RICHES OF POOR CHILDREN
LXVI A MAN’S RIGHT TO HIS HOME
LXVII DEVOURING FRIENDS
LXVIII THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS
LXIX PREPAREDNESS FOR OLD AGE
Transcriber’s Notes
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE