Chapter V: Part 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXX

HUSBAND LOSERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXXI

MARTHA OR MARY?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXXII

THE T. B. M. AT HOME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXXIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXXIV

QUEER THINGS ABOUT MARRIAGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXXV

HUSBANDS—THE LIVING CONUNDRUM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXXVI

THE POWER OF SUGGESTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXXVII

WOMAN’S MISSIONARY OPPORTUNITY

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

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

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

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

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