Chapter IV: Part 4

It is true that a couple who knew the worst of each other would start out their life together on a firm foundation of honest understanding, but nobody can claim that it would make for their felicity, or increase their affection for each other. On the contrary, they would have swept away every illusion. They would have destroyed the faith of each in the other, and they would have called into being an evil spirit, a ghost out of the past, that they could not banish, and that would forever stand between them.

Men have had the wisdom to perceive this. They realize that what a woman doesn’t know doesn’t hurt her, but that the thing that she does know she worries herself to death over, and so few men are foolish enough to furnish a wife with a working diagram of their past lives with which she can torture herself, and them. They draw a discreet veil over episodes that are best forgotten, anyway, and deal only in glittering generalities in referring to their gay bachelor days. Moreover, women are sensible enough to let it go at that. No woman wants her husband to tell her things that stab her every time she thinks of them, and that eat like a canker into her memory.

It is only when the case is reversed, and when it is the woman who has a blot upon her past, that she wonders if it is the right thing, the honorable thing, to tell the man who wants to marry her about it. Of course, the woman is bound in this by the double code of morals, which makes one standard for the woman and another for the man, and that, humorously enough, makes a husband feel that he has been exceedingly ill-used if he discovers that his wife has a past that matches his own.

Therefore, because she is afraid that in future years her husband may find out about her past life, or else driven by her conscience, or for the sheer relief of sharing her burden with another, the woman nearly always tells everything to the man before marriage. Sometimes it drives him from her. Sometimes he loves her enough to marry her, in spite of her revelations.

But, while he forgives, he never forgets. Always he is haunted by the memories of what she has revealed. He never trusts her, never wholly believes in her, and he has to be a bigger-souled man than most men are if he does not reproach her with her past, and use it as a whip of scorpions to scourge her with when he is angry with her.

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

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

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

XXI

DOMESTIC BOREDOM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXII

TO MARRY OR NOT TO MARRY?

A young woman once said to me:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXIII

WOMAN’S GREATEST GIFT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXIV

GRAFTING ON THE OLD FOLKS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXV

ARE YOU A GOOD FATHER?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXVI

THE MORAL MUSCLES OF YOUR CHILDREN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXVII

THE MOTHER-IN-LAW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXVIII

WHY OUR FAMILIES RILE US

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXIX

OUR LIVES ARE WHAT WE MAKE THEM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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