Chapter VII: Part 7

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

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

XLVI

OLD FATHERS AND NEW DAUGHTERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

XLVII

LOSING A WIFE’S LOVE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XLVIII

THE LURE OF THE MARRIED MAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XLIX

FORGET IT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

L

LOST LOVE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LI

THE SHOW WEDDING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LII

WHEN YOUR CHILDREN ARE GLAD YOU DIE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIII

WHAT PRICE PLEASURE?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIV

THE IDEAL MOTHER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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