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author: nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org> 2025-02-23 07:21:37 -0800
committer: nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org> 2025-02-23 07:21:37 -0800
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+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html lang="en">
+<head>
+    <meta charset="UTF-8">
+    <title>
+      Dorothy Dix—Her Book | Project Gutenberg
+    </title>
+    <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover">
+    <style>
+
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+    margin-left: 10%;
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+
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+
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+
+.figcenter {
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+    text-align: center;
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+    max-width: 100%;
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+
+/* Transcriber's notes */
+.transnote {background-color: #E6E6FA;
+    color: black;
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+/* Illustration classes */
+.illowp15 {width: 15%;}
+.illowp85 {width: 85%;}
+    </style>
+</head>
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75448 ***</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 85%">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="Cover">
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<figure class="figcenter illowp85" id="frontis" style="max-width: 37.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/frontis.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p class="right fs150"><span style="padding-right: 2em"><em>Yours Sincerely</em></span><br>
+<em>Dorothy Dix</em>
+</p>
+</figcaption>
+</figure>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter pageborder">
+<p class="center no-indent fs200 wsp bold">
+<em>Dorothy Dix—Her Book</em></p>
+
+<hr class="full">
+<br>
+<p class="center no-indent fs120 wsp">Every-day Help<br>
+For Every-day People</p>
+
+<hr class="full">
+<br>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp15" id="titlepage" style="max-width: 17.1875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/titlepage.jpg" alt="Decoration">
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center no-indent fs80 wsp">SECOND EDITION</p>
+<br>
+
+<hr class="full">
+
+<p class="center no-indent fs120 wsp bold">FUNK &amp; WAGNALLS COMPANY<br>
+<span class="fs80">NEW YORK and LONDON</span><br>
+<span class="fs70">1927</span><br>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center no-indent fs80 wsp">
+<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1926, by</span><br>
+<span class="fs120">FUNK &amp; WAGNALLS COMPANY</span><br>
+[Printed in the United States of America]<br>
+Published, August, 1926<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Copyright Under the Articles of the Copyright Convention<br>
+of the Pan-American Republics and the<br>
+United States, August 11, 1910.<br>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="Contents"><em>Contents</em></h2>
+</div>
+
+<table class="autotable">
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr fs70">CHAPTER</td>
+<td class="tdl"></td>
+<td class="tdr fs70">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Foreword</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_xi">xi</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr"></td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Introduction</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_xix">xix</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">I</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">How a Husband Likes to be Treated</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">II</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Charm</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_10">10</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">III</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Ordinary Woman</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_22">22</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">IV</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Teach the Children to Love Father</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_27">27</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">V</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Strike a Balance with Matrimony</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_32">32</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">VI</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Jealousy</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_39">39</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">VII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Have a Goal</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_44">44</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">VIII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Goat Family</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_48">48</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">IX</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Spoiling a Wife</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_53">53</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">X</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Absence Cure for Family Ills</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_58">58</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XI</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Deadly Rival</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_63">63</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Learn a Trade, Girls</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_67">67</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XIII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Trial Divorce</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_76">76</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XIV</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Marry the Man You Love</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_81">81</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XV</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Are You Good Company for Yourself?</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_87">87</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XVI</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Keeping Young</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_92">92</a><span class="pagenum" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XVII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Gossip, the Policeman</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_96">96</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XVIII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Lucky Working Woman</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_100">100</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XIX</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">An Indoor Sport</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_105">105</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XX</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Should Women Tell?</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_109">109</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XXI</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Domestic Boredom</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_114">114</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XXII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">To Marry or Not to Marry</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XXIII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Woman’s Greatest Gift</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_122">122</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XXIV</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Grafting on the Old Folks</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_127">127</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XXV</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Are You a Good Father?</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_132">132</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XXVI</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Moral Muscles of Your Children</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_136">136</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XXVII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Mother-in-Law</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_140">140</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XXVIII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Why Our Families Rile Us</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_145">145</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XXIX</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Our Lives Are What We Make Them</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_149">149</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XXX</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Husband Losers</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_154">154</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XXXI</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Martha or Mary?</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_159">159</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XXXII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The T. B. M. at Home</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_163">163</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XXXIII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Don’t Be Afraid to Let Your Husband See You Love Him</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_169">169</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XXXIV</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Queer Things about Marriage</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_174">174</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XXXV</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Husbands—The Living Conundrum</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_180">180</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XXXVI</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Power of Suggestion</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_185">185</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XXXVII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Woman’s Missionary Opportunity</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_190">190</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XXXVIII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">How to be a Good Husband</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_195">195</a><span class="pagenum" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XXXIX</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Giving Children Advantages</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_200">200</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XL</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Sell Yourself to Your Children</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_205">205</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XLI</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Taking Husbands “As Is”</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_210">210</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XLII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Being a Good Wife</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_215">215</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XLIII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Invalidism a Graft</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_222">222</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XLIV</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Selfishness Made to Order</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_227">227</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XLV</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Self-Control</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_231">231</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XLVI</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Old Fathers and New Daughters</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_236">236</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XLVII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Losing a Wife’s Love</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_240">240</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XLVIII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Lure of the Married Man</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_245">245</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XLIX</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Forget It</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_249">249</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">L</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Lost Love</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_254">254</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">LI</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Show Wedding</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_259">259</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">LII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">When Your Children Are Glad You Die</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_264">264</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">LIII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">What Price Pleasure?</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_269">269</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">LIV</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Ideal Mother</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_273">273</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">LV</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">How to Catch a Wife</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_278">278</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">LVI</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Dangerous Girls</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_283">283</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">LVII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">When a Girl Loves a Man</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_288">288</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">LVIII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Marriage Lessons</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_293">293</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">LIX</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Superior Business Woman</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_297">297</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">LX</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">New Ideals for Old</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_301">301</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">LXI</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Why Divorce is Common</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_305">305</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">LXII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Children Pay</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_310">310</a><span class="pagenum" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">LXIII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Learned Profession of Home-Making</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_315">315</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">LXIV</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">A Father’s Influence</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_320">320</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">LXV</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Riches of Poor Children</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_325">325</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">LXVI</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">A Man’s Right to His Home</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_330">330</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">LXVII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Devouring Friends</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_334">334</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">LXVIII</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Secret of Happiness</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_338">338</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">LXIX</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Preparedness for Old Age</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_343">343</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak bold" id="Foreword"><em>Foreword</em></h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h1><em>Dorothy Dix—Her Book</em></h1>
+</div>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">A Foreword by Richard Duffy</span></h3>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">To</span> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xiii">[Pg xiii]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xiv">[Pg xiv]</span>
+quiet fame of a weekly pay-envelope which is the
+rock foundation of “Home Sweet Home.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">dramatis personæ</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Despite this fact there never has been nor will<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xv">[Pg xv]</span>
+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:</p>
+
+<p>“How many such letters do you receive a month?”</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>“Great Scott!” exclaimed the novelist. “You
+have more plots in a day’s letters than any hard-working
+novelist could invent in a year.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xvii">[Pg xvii]</span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center no-indent fs120 bold"><em>Introduction</em></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xix">[Pg xix]</span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="Introduction"><em>Introduction</em></h2>
+</div>
+
+<h3>MY PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE</h3>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">I have</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xx">[Pg xx]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><em>I am not afraid of poverty</em> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxi">[Pg xxi]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Above all I have acquired a sense of humor, because
+there were so many things over which I had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxii">[Pg xxii]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span class="smcap" style="padding-right: 1em">Dorothy Dix.</span></p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</span></p>
+<p class="center no-indent fs120 wsp bold"><em>Dorothy Dix—Her Book</em></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center no-indent fs120 wsp bold"><em>Dorothy Dix—Her Book</em></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="I">I<br>
+<span class="fs70">HOW A HUSBAND LIKES TO BE TREATED</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Altho</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</span>
+worse, but seldom do they treat the men just as the
+men would like to be treated.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Now the majority of husbands average up quite<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</span>
+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:</p>
+
+<p>(a) Like a baby.</p>
+
+<p>(b) Like a demigod.</p>
+
+<p>(c) Like a good fellow.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Men are babyish in wanting their wives to show<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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?”</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, every husband likes to be treated as if
+he were a demigod.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</span>
+as a beneficent providence from whom all blessings
+flow.</p>
+
+<p>Husbands like to be treated as good fellows.</p>
+
+<p>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!”</p>
+
+<p>But his prayer isn’t often answered.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</span>
+on her prettiest dress and go out with him if he
+wants to go to any place of amusement.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="II">II<br>
+<span class="fs70">CHARM</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Over</span> and over again girls ask me these questions:
+What is charm? What is the secret
+of the attraction that some women have for
+men?</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In Barrie’s delightful play, “What Every Woman
+Knows,” Maggie’s brothers, discussing her with the
+brutal frankness with which brothers approach the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</span>
+while a witty woman cuts her throat with her own
+tongue.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <em>n</em>th power. That is
+the best way to acquire personality, the “something
+different” about us that sets us apart from every<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span>
+other human being, instead of our being just one
+of the herd.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span>
+and sought after and is the life of the party
+wherever she goes.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Surely this should suggest to every girl the wisdom
+of retiring to her closet, and having a heart-to-heart<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="III">III<br>
+<span class="fs70">THE ORDINARY WOMAN</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">I wish</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The husband was not one of the fortunate few who
+have the gift of making money. He worked hard,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span>
+but opportunity does not smile on every man, and
+the wolf was never very far away from their door.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>There was no rest for her, day or night. There<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span>
+to educate and cultivate their children—digging
+with their own hands the chasm that will separate
+them almost as much as death itself would.</p>
+
+<p>Wherefore I say the Ordinary Woman is the real
+heroine of life.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="IV">IV<br>
+<span class="fs70">TEACH THE CHILDREN TO LOVE FATHER</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Are</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span>
+schools, and dress like fashion plates, and go in the
+right circles.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the attitude of children toward their father
+is almost entirely determined by their mother; and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="V">V<br>
+<span class="fs70">STRIKE A BALANCE WITH MATRIMONY</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">I get</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It is incredible, but it is true, that despite her
+lifelong knowledge of the daily life her mother has<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>To these unhappy wives I would offer this bit of
+homely counsel:</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span>
+no more give her back her lost joy, and faith, and
+trust, than it can restore her lost girlhood.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span>
+gets the best out of what she has. She makes the
+most of her bargain.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="VI">VI<br>
+<span class="fs70">JEALOUSY</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">A woman</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span>
+hat on the side of his head and proceeds to justify
+her once groundless suspicions.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span>
+far and away from the thoughts of the poor gentlemen.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="VII">VII<br>
+<span class="fs70">HAVE A GOAL</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">The</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="VIII">VIII<br>
+<span class="fs70">THE GOAT FAMILY</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Kind</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span>
+the money to help maintain the family, and who
+comes home at night and does most of the housework.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span>
+how I can get out of being a perpetual Goat as long
+as I live.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>For while we all make use of the Goat family, we
+hold them in contempt because they let us make
+goats of them.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="IX">IX<br>
+<span class="fs70">SPOILING A WIFE</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">A man</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, yes, a man can easily be too good to his wife.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="X">X<br>
+<span class="fs70">THE ABSENCE CURE FOR FAMILY ILLS</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">One</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Being obliged to live with disagreeable and antagonistic
+people is the greatest affliction that can<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span>
+living together they merely get on each other’s
+nerves, and hate each other.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Try the absence cure on your domestic troubles.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XI">XI<br>
+<span class="fs70">THE DEADLY RIVAL</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">It</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The first baby definitely and for all time puts the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But she will seldom go with him, and when she<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Remember that, ladies, and don’t make your baby
+your husband’s deadly rival.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XII">XII<br>
+<span class="fs70">LEARN A TRADE, GIRLS</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">These</span> 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?”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>No women in the world are so pitiful as those
+who have, as the saying goes, “seen better days”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>There has been a most decided decline and falloff
+in matrimony and home life, and it is foolish for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But when you can stand on your own feet you can
+snap your fingers in the face of the world and tell<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</span>
+In some occupations it is a little better paid because
+there are fewer women experts than there are men.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Having selected your occupation, perfect yourself<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XIII">XIII<br>
+<span class="fs70">TRIAL DIVORCE</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">I believe</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</span>
+self. The rebellion at the sacrifices that matrimony
+demands.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>And in their secret souls both are conscience-stricken
+when they look at their children and see<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>So, when we unscramble our scrambled marriage
+laws, let’s put the trial divorce into them.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XIV">XIV<br>
+<span class="fs70">MARRY THE MAN YOU LOVE</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">A young</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</span>
+to her, unless he can raise a thrill in her breast
+everything is cinders, ashes and dust to her.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Truly, it is more blessed to give than to receive,
+and it is better for a woman to love than to be loved.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XV">XV<br>
+<span class="fs70">ARE YOU GOOD COMPANY FOR YOURSELF?</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Do</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</span>
+even a hero scream with pain, and to see moving
+pictures whose scenarios are an insult to the intelligence
+of an idiot.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But if they are reading people they can never
+have a dull instant when they are alone, for every<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>You cannot imagine a widow spending a cheery
+evening recalling how she nagged her poor, dead<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</span>
+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!</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XVI">XVI<br>
+<span class="fs70">KEEPING YOUNG</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">None</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</span>
+simply by forgetting their birthdays, they can maintain
+perpetual girlhood.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XVII">XVII<br>
+<span class="fs70">GOSSIP, THE POLICEMAN</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">A young</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>“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?”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</span>
+the alluring invitations and stays at home, and
+minds her p’s and her q’s and her babies.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The people who think it is so wicked to be talked
+about are only those who have something to hide,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XVIII">XVIII<br>
+<span class="fs70">THE LUCKY WORKING WOMAN</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Why</span> 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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It is a significant fact that the women who fill<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</span>
+is that life is flat, stale and unpalatable in her
+mouth.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XIX">XIX<br>
+<span class="fs70">AN INDOOR SPORT</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">This</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The same strictures apply to the woman who<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</span>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XX">XX<br>
+<span class="fs70">SHOULD WOMEN TELL?</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">I get</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>This is a problem no human wisdom can solve,
+for, so far as the woman is concerned, it is a case<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Confession is always weakness. The brave soul<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXI">XXI<br>
+<span class="fs70">DOMESTIC BOREDOM</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">The</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</span>
+happens to call, or they go out to dinner, the very
+man who was silent at home finds plenty to say.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>And that is why conversation is a lost art in the
+family circle.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXII">XXII<br>
+<span class="fs70">TO MARRY OR NOT TO MARRY?</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">A young</span> woman once said to me:</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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?</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</span>
+yacht,’ I should doff my Cinderella working suit and
+put on my glass slippers, and step out with him.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“And whichever way you decide, you will be apt
+to regret it,” I replied consolingly.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXIII">XXIII<br>
+<span class="fs70">WOMAN’S GREATEST GIFT</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">A man</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</span>
+cry, and if she can’t laugh them off, they get on
+her nerves, and she goes to pieces.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, a woman with a sense of humor can
+take the curse off of even bad cooking, for there is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</span>
+and women to borrow trouble worrying over what is
+going to become of the race.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXIV">XXIV<br>
+<span class="fs70">GRAFTING ON THE OLD FOLKS</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">It</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>As they grow up, children continue to demand<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</span>
+in a few of the luxuries they have had to deny themselves
+while they were raising and educating their
+children.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</span>
+family, and her daughters haven’t any right to
+make her substitute on raising another one.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps, if they realized that parents had rights,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXV">XXV<br>
+<span class="fs70">ARE YOU A GOOD FATHER?</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Are</span> 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!</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXVI">XXVI<br>
+<span class="fs70">THE MORAL MUSCLES OF YOUR CHILDREN</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">The</span> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</span>
+coerced by determined and strong-handed parents
+into walking the straight and narrow path.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXVII">XXVII<br>
+<span class="fs70">THE MOTHER-IN-LAW</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Undoubtedly</span> 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:</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</span>
+children and to keep hands off in their affairs and
+treat them with the formality you would strangers.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</span>
+forget his wife when some younger and fairer woman
+came along.</p>
+
+<p>“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?</p>
+
+<p>“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?</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXVIII">XXVIII<br>
+<span class="fs70">WHY OUR FAMILIES RILE US</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">A woman</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Mother is a born manager, one of the ladies who
+honestly believe, with the famous Frenchman, that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</span>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</span>
+wounding things to us are those of our own
+household.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXIX">XXIX<br>
+<span class="fs70">OUR LIVES ARE WHAT WE MAKE THEM</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">You</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</span>
+we can acquire a philosophy that will enable us to
+laugh instead of weep over the misadventures that
+befall us.</p>
+
+<p>For our lives are what we make them. It is all
+up to us.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXX">XXX<br>
+<span class="fs70">HUSBAND LOSERS</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Three</span> divorced women were talking together
+the other day and one of them said:</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>“How much happiness we might save if only our
+wisdom did not come too late,” sighed the first
+woman.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXI">XXXI<br>
+<span class="fs70">MARTHA OR MARY?</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Clever</span> Mary—who, take it from me,
+knows her way about—was talking about
+her friend, Martha, the other day.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Husband and children flee these temples of order<span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXII">XXXII<br>
+<span class="fs70">THE T. B. M. AT HOME</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">A man</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The mistake that most wives make is in taking
+their husbands too seriously. They have heard so<span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The cruel speeches that stab the wife to the soul
+are not prompted by malice toward her. They are<span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>So much for the wife’s side of the question. Now
+for the husband’s.</p>
+
+<p>Business furnishes no alibi for surliness, and
+grouchiness, and general disagreeableness. No man
+has a right to come home at night and dump down<span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</span>
+on his own hearthstone all the nerves, and temper,
+and irritability he has kept bottled up in him all day.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXIII">XXXIII<br>
+<span class="fs70">DON’T BE AFRAID TO LET YOUR HUSBAND SEE
+YOU LOVE HIM</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">A woman</span> 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?”</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</span>
+just as much as women do, and they long just as
+much as women do to be petted and fussed over.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXIV">XXXIV<br>
+<span class="fs70">QUEER THINGS ABOUT MARRIAGE</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Did</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Isn’t the casual attitude we take toward matrimony
+queer?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Isn’t it queer that people don’t pick out the kind
+of husbands and wives that they want, and that will
+suit them?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</span>
+that her chatter was the chatter of a magpie,
+and the things in which she delighted were things
+that bored him stiff.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The philanderer believes that he will never cast a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXV">XXXV<br>
+<span class="fs70">HUSBANDS—THE LIVING CONUNDRUM</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">A woman</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>No woman ever understands, for instance, why it
+is that a man who was an ardent and impetuous<span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXVI">XXXVI<br>
+<span class="fs70">THE POWER OF SUGGESTION</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Among</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>She is making the girl feel that she is sophisticated<span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The power of suggestion is so far reaching in its<span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXVII">XXXVII<br>
+<span class="fs70">WOMAN’S MISSIONARY OPPORTUNITY</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">As</span> 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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</span>
+and to perform some miracle that would make
+life easier for all who come after her.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</span>
+whom she prays God on her knees to deliver her
+own precious darlings.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</span>
+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?”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXVIII">XXXVIII<br>
+<span class="fs70">HOW TO BE A GOOD HUSBAND</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">A young</span> 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?”</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“While as for giving a wife sustenance and raiment,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</span></p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</span>
+wife’s, when it will please her to death and make
+her think what a wonderful man she has married?</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“If you want to be a good husband, son, remember<span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXIX">XXXIX<br>
+<span class="fs70">GIVING CHILDREN ADVANTAGES</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Among</span> 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:</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</span>
+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 <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">roué</i> 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?</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XL">XL<br>
+<span class="fs70">SELL YOURSELF TO YOUR CHILDREN</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Did</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Why not sell our children education? We scourge<span class="pagenum" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</span>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLI">XLI<br>
+<span class="fs70">TAKING HUSBANDS “AS IS”</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">I wish</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</span>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</span>
+give in to them or fight over them. He has his set
+opinions, and she can sidestep them or fight with
+him about them.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLII">XLII<br>
+<span class="fs70">BEING A GOOD WIFE</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">“I want</span> 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?”</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.’</p>
+
+<p>“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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</span>
+fortunes call him. To fight the battle with him
+shoulder to shoulder and never to give up the ship.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“But mostly, my dear, if you want to help your
+husband, just love him enough. Perhaps that is
+the best way of all.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLIII">XLIII<br>
+<span class="fs70">INVALIDISM A GRAFT</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Do</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Ninety per cent of all the sickness in the world is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</span>
+voluntary, or at least comes through contributory
+negligence. People are sick because they are not
+willing to make the sacrifices to keep well.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<em>carte blanche</em> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</span>
+isn’t the work that is hurting the girls. It is the
+way they dress and live.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</span>
+quit being sick, and go to work and support themselves.</p>
+
+<p>That is why I say that it is dishonest to be sick
+when you might be well.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLIV">XLIV<br>
+<span class="fs70">SELFISHNESS MADE TO ORDER</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">“My</span> 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!”</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</span></p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</span>
+The drudge mother gets only the wages of the
+drudge from her children.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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?”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLV">XLV<br>
+<span class="fs70">SELF-CONTROL</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">If</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</span>
+not be what I am if my mother had taught me to
+control myself.”</p>
+
+<p>For it is lack of self-control that is at the bottom
+of most of our sins of omission and commission.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</span>
+of the rights of others, or he will be a little demon,
+according to the way his mother has brought him up.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLVI">XLVI<br>
+<span class="fs70">OLD FATHERS AND NEW DAUGHTERS</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">“O dear</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</span></p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</span></p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLVII">XLVII<br>
+<span class="fs70">LOSING A WIFE’S LOVE</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">One</span> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</span>
+get tired of their husbands as there are husbands
+who are weary of their wives.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLVIII">XLVIII<br>
+<span class="fs70">THE LURE OF THE MARRIED MAN</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">A man</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Also, women are the adventurous sex. They love
+to play with danger as a child plays with fire, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</span>
+man, who would bore them to tears if his wedding
+ring had not given him a fictitious value in their
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLIX">XLIX<br>
+<span class="fs70">FORGET IT</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Every</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Believe me, if the girl who does not attract men,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>As it is now she falls between the stools. She is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</span>
+exceptional marriages, who are as well off as the
+business girls who do not marry.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="L">L<br>
+<span class="fs70">LOST LOVE</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Many</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</span>
+miracle will happen that will give them back their
+lost love.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</span>
+bore who wearies us to tears. It just happens, and
+we are as helpless before one situation as before
+the other.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>If she is a married woman whose husband has
+ceased to love her, let her agonize no more over the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LI">LI<br>
+<span class="fs70">THE SHOW WEDDING</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">The</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</span>
+people to come and watch you die than it is to come
+and see you married.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LII">LII<br>
+<span class="fs70">WHEN YOUR CHILDREN ARE GLAD YOU DIE</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Parents</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LIII">LIII<br>
+<span class="fs70">WHAT PRICE PLEASURE?</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Do</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LIV">LIV<br>
+<span class="fs70">THE IDEAL MOTHER</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">A woman</span> asks: “What qualities should the
+ideal mother possess?”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</span>
+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!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <em>she</em> 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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LV">LV<br>
+<span class="fs70">HOW TO CATCH A WIFE</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">“You</span> 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?”</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>First. Study your girl. Catalogue her. Find
+out to what type she belongs and adapt your tactics<span class="pagenum" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</span>
+to a woman’s heart it is his own fault if he does not
+open it all the way.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>If the girl you desire is one of the morbid sort who
+hangs between “I will” and “I won’t,” who is always<span class="pagenum" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LVI">LVI<br>
+<span class="fs70">DANGEROUS GIRLS</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Chief</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</span>
+busy and the world salted down with the brine of
+our tears.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LVII">LVII<br>
+<span class="fs70">WHEN A GIRL LOVES A MAN</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">A youth</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</span>
+about the state of her feelings. She hasn’t even
+subtlety enough about her to keep a man guessing.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LVIII">LVIII<br>
+<span class="fs70">MARRIAGE LESSONS</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">What</span> has marriage taught you?</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“And so husbands treat their wives according to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LIX">LIX<br>
+<span class="fs70">THE SUPERIOR BUSINESS WOMAN</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">The</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</span>
+is, to be more successful than she is. She must look
+up to him, revere him, ask his opinion, be guided by
+his advice.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LX">LX<br>
+<span class="fs70">NEW IDEALS FOR OLD</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">The</span> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</span>
+was a dear little sweetie who was not to bother her
+poor little foolish head over the cost of anything.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LXI">LXI<br>
+<span class="fs70">WHY DIVORCE IS COMMON</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">When</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</span>
+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!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>These little things—the niceties of life that one<span class="pagenum" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LXII">LXII<br>
+<span class="fs70">THE CHILDREN PAY</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">No</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LXIII">LXIII<br>
+<span class="fs70">THE LEARNED PROFESSION OF HOME-MAKING</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">No</span> 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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>She must be a general.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</span>
+trunks and go. Only the very quintessence of diplomacy
+renders a mistress <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">persona grata</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>She must be an artist.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>She must be a poet.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</span>
+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!</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LXIV">LXIV<br>
+<span class="fs70">A FATHER’S INFLUENCE</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">There</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</span>
+thought would show them how fallacious such a belief
+is.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>When a man has that kind of a wife—and no man<span class="pagenum" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LXV">LXV<br>
+<span class="fs70">THE RICHES OF POOR CHILDREN</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">The</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</span>
+and uninteresting because they have never been
+taught to see the under side of things?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LXVI">LXVI<br>
+<span class="fs70">A MAN’S RIGHT TO HIS HOME</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">It</span> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</span>
+exceeding peace and joy, and no good husband should
+withhold this pleasure from his wife.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LXVII">LXVII<br>
+<span class="fs70">DEVOURING FRIENDS</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">“One</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Being an unusually charming and entertaining
+individual, my husband is regarded by my friends
+as a social tidbit—a particularly savory <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">hors
+d’œuvre</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LXVIII">LXVIII<br>
+<span class="fs70">THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">What</span> 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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</span>
+loaf. Intelligent, thinking men and women must keep
+busy in order to be happy.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, remember the song, “I Want to Be Happy,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LXIX">LXIX<br>
+<span class="fs70">PREPAREDNESS FOR OLD AGE</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">What</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</span>
+begin winning their hearts when they are in the
+cradle.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="no-indent fs120 wsp"><em>The Blue Book of Social Usage</em>—</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center no-indent fs150 bold">Etiquette</p>
+
+<p class="center no-indent fs120 bold wsp">In Society, In Business, In Politics, and At Home</p>
+
+<p class="center no-indent fs120 wsp"><em>By EMILY POST</em></p>
+
+
+<p>“The most complete book on social usage that ever
+grew between two covers.” There are 24 pages about
+introductions and greetings, 7 about street conduct,
+13 on conduct at the theatre, 10 on conversation, 25
+on cards and visits, 33 on invitations, 12 on teas,
+61 on dinners, 12 on breakfasts and suppers, 26 on
+balls and dances, 12 on “the debutante,” 12 on matrimonial
+engagements, 33 on preparations for the wedding,
+35 on “the day of the wedding,” 23 on funerals,
+58 on letters, 22 on dress, 9 on the clothes of a gentleman,
+34 on the well-appointed house, 24 on traveling
+at home and abroad.</p>
+
+<p>The author is a shining figure in society and her
+charming and popular book is accepted everywhere as the
+authoritative Blue Book of Social Usage. Illustrated.</p>
+
+<p class="center no-indent fs80"><em>Crown 8vo, Cloth. <span style="padding-left: 1em">639 pages.</span> <span style="padding-left: 1em">$4</span>, net; flexible leather, $7.50, net;
+postage, 18c extra.</em></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="no-indent fs120 wsp"><em>The Blue Book of Personal Attire</em>—</p>
+
+<p class="center no-indent fs150 wsp bold">How to Dress Well</p>
+
+<p>A valuable treatise by an authority which considers
+dress for women from both the artistic and the
+practical view-points, and provides sound information
+on the principles of tasteful and attractive apparel.
+Not only does this book give details for enhancing
+one’s personal appearance, for slenderizing the stout,
+for broadening the slender, for the selection of headwear
+and other accessories, but also practical guidance
+for the selection and testing of materials, choosing
+of laces and furs, budgeting the dress allowance,
+and for the care and up keep of the wardrobe. It is
+brimful of the very information pertaining to dress,
+color, and toilet accessories about which every woman
+hesitates to accept any but truly trustworthy advice
+and is a fitting companion to Emily Post’s “Etiquette.”
+Modistes, designers, dressmakers, and milliners will
+also find this work of highest value. Illustrated.</p>
+
+<p class="center no-indent fs80"><em>8vo, Cloth. 494 pages. $3.50, net; postage, 18c extra.</em></p>
+<br>
+
+
+<p class="center no-indent fs150 wsp bold">The Blue Book of Cookery<br>
+<span class="fs70">And Manual of House Management</span></p>
+
+<p class="center no-indent fs120 wsp"><em>By ISABEL COTTON SMITH</em></p>
+
+<p class="center no-indent fs80 wsp"><em>With an Introduction by Emily Post, Author of “Etiquette”</em></p>
+
+
+<p>This is not “just another cookbook,” but an original
+and authoritative guide for the preparation of foods
+and for house management. All the originality and
+importance of this volume would be of limited value
+unless it were written by so capable and practical an
+authority as Isabel Cotton Smith. It contains more
+than 2,000 recipes; gives complete information on the
+management of house and home, with invaluable suggestions
+for table economy, and includes everything
+for every season and every day in the year, for every
+possible repast from breakfast to late supper and
+from teas and picnic meals to specially designed menus
+for children at home and at school, as well as menus
+for vegetarians.</p>
+
+<p class="center no-indent fs80 wsp"><em>Crown 8vo, Washable Fabrikoid. $2.50, net; postage, 18c extra.</em></p>
+<br>
+
+
+<p class="center no-indent fs150 bold wsp">A Woman of Fifty</p>
+
+<p class="center no-indent fs120 wsp"><em>By RHETA CHILDE DORR</em></p>
+
+<p>This unique autobiography of a remarkable and
+courageous woman covers one of the most revolutionary
+periods of time in history—from virtually the
+beginning of a concerted movement to organize the
+women of this country in the fight for equality in
+politics and industry to the time when these hitherto
+unattainable causes were firmly established in our economic
+and governmental systems. As journalist, lecturer,
+editor, and writer, the author has taken part in
+virtually every event that marks her generation; was
+the only woman war correspondent with the famed
+Russian Women’s “Battalion of Death” on the last
+Kerensky offensive on the Eastern Front; spent three
+years in “after war” Europe, and is to-day in the
+thick of things in this country. Written in a frank,
+forceful, and grippingly interesting style.</p>
+
+<p class="center no-indent fs80 wsp"><em>8vo, Cloth. 482 pp. $2.50, net; postage, 18c extra.</em></p>
+
+<p class="center no-indent fs120 bold wsp">
+FUNK &amp; WAGNALLS COMPANY, Publishers<br>
+<span class="fs80">354-360 Fourth Avenue, New York</span><br>
+</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter transnote">
+<h2 class="nobreak fs150 bold" id="Transcribers_Notes">Transcriber’s Notes</h2>
+
+<table class="autotable">
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">pg 58 Changed:</td>
+<td class="tdl">which are resonsible for more real</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">to:</td>
+<td class="tdl">which are responsible for more real</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">pg 61 Changed:</td>
+<td class="tdl">you happen to be born in a certain relationshp</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">to:</td>
+<td class="tdl">you happen to be born in a certain relationship</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">pg 71 Changed: </td>
+<td class="tdl">any particular trade or profesion</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">to:</td>
+<td class="tdl">any particular trade or profession</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">pg 101 Changed:</td>
+<td class="tdl">earn her own living as a “poor working women.”</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">to:</td>
+<td class="tdl">earn her own living as a “poor working woman.”</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">pg 105 Changed:</td>
+<td class="tdl">so far be it from me to abridge</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">to:</td>
+<td class="tdl">so far be it for me to abridge</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">pg 150 Changed:</td>
+<td class="tdl">life better than than that of the successful</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">to:</td>
+<td class="tdl">life better than that of the successful</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">pg 179 Changed:</td>
+<td class="tdl">he will be filled fell of pep and energy</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">to:</td>
+<td class="tdl">he will be filled full of pep and energy</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">pg 179 Changed:</td>
+<td class="tdl">discovery that somewhow the mysterious something</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">to:</td>
+<td class="tdl">discovery that somehow the mysterious something</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">pg 188 Changed:</td>
+<td class="tdl">she is not likely to tarnish your deal.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">to:</td>
+<td class="tdl">she is not likely to tarnish your ideal.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">pg 217 Changed:</td>
+<td class="tdl">as many men starving for affection as there are woman.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">to:</td>
+<td class="tdl">as many men starving for affection as there are women.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">pg 218 Changed:</td>
+<td class="tdl">reward depends altogther on his wife’s attitude</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">to:</td>
+<td class="tdl">reward depends altogether on his wife’s attitude</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">pg 221 Changed:</td>
+<td class="tdl">their purpose when they falter and waiver</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">to:</td>
+<td class="tdl">their purpose when they falter and waver</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+</div>
+
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75448 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
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author	nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org>	2025-02-23 07:21:37 -0800
committer	nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org>	2025-02-23 07:21:37 -0800
commit	8af1bd920f5102206a322c96bebe0dce6785b3e2 (patch)
tree	89f8e51425de20a130cb99c5dd413f9e2ef24f20 /75448-h