Chapter II: Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

STRIKE A BALANCE WITH MATRIMONY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

JEALOUSY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII

HAVE A GOAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII

THE GOAT FAMILY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX

SPOILING A WIFE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

X

THE ABSENCE CURE FOR FAMILY ILLS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XI

THE DEADLY RIVAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XII

LEARN A TRADE, GIRLS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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