Chapter VIII: Part 8

The ideal mother has a sense of proportion. She doesn’t see her ducklings as swans. Her love doesn’t blind her to her children’s faults and blemishes. Rather it sharpens her vision, so that she gets a line on them as they really are. Thereby she is enabled to help them make the most of such gifts as they have. She sees that Tom is brilliant but unstable and lacking in purpose, and she holds him to whatever he undertakes to do until she forms the habit of steadfastness in him. She sees that John is dull but a plodder, and she trains him for some occupation in which quickness of mind is not demanded and in which the prizes go to faithfulness and hard work. She sees that Mary is intelligent but homely, and lacking the charms that allure men, so she gives her some occupation by which she can make a good living for herself and which will fill her life with interest. And this sense of proportion keeps her from making her children ridiculous by bragging about them, and boring every one with whom she comes in contact with endless stories of what wonderful and marvelous creatures they are, and how, wherever they go, they are the cynosure of all eyes and the admiration of all beholders.

Finally, the ideal mother should have a sense of humor that will enable her to laugh instead of cry over many of her children’s peccadilloes and keep her from taking them too seriously. For the thing that ails young people is chiefly youth, and they will get over that if you will give them a little time. Because they are idle, irresponsible, pleasure-loving, dance-mad, girl and boy crazy is no reason for prophesying dismal things about them and wringing your hands in despair. It is a passing phase of life at which we elders may well grin, remembering the time when we also were young and foolish. An old woman who had raised up a remarkable family of sons and daughters once gave me this as her recipe for bringing up children: “Kiss them when they are good. Spank them when they’re bad and teach them to obey you.” That is the whole of the law and the prophets.

LV

HOW TO CATCH A WIFE

“You are always telling girls how to catch husbands,” says a young man. “Why don’t you give us chaps a few tips about how to get wives?”

Well, son, perhaps I unconsciously favor women because I belong to their lodge. Also, it is more difficult for a woman to catch a husband than it is for a man to get a wife, not only because women are more inclined to matrimony than men are, but because a woman’s pursuit of a man has to be stealthy and secret and under cover, with all of her tracks carefully hidden and her purposes veiled, whereas a man can go after a woman openly and aboveboard, with everybody looking on and applauding the chase. Therefore, the woman is more in need of any stray hints that may improve her technique than the man is. Still, far be it from me to withhold from my brothers any information I may have about the short cuts to the feminine heart. So to the really earnest seeker after knowledge on this subject I would say:

First. Study your girl. Catalogue her. Find out to what type she belongs and adapt your tactics to the situation, for all women no more rise to the same line of courtship than all fish bite at the same bait. There are some feminine hearts that can only be taken by assault and battery and others that surrender to patient siege. There are women whose love is for sale to the highest bidder and others who bestow it in pity. There are women who like a business proposition and women who fall only for the romantic wooing. So there you are, and your success will depend upon your ability to psychoanalyze the particular woman and upon the skill with which you suggest to her that you are the great unsatisfied need of her soul.

If the girl is of the clear-eyed, upstanding, competent business type, your best method of winning her is by the good, old, well-tried Platonic friendship method. She isn’t anxious to exchange a mahogany desk for a kitchen range nor to give up a good pay envelope and an easy job to toil for some man for nothing. Likewise, she has worked with men too long for her to see any rosy halo around the masculine brow, so she is pretty apt to shy off at any suggestion of marriage and balk at the thought of the altar. But life lacks savor to every woman without masculine society, and so this particular type of woman is especially allured by the idea of a beautiful and satisfying friendship with some man. And when a chap has got his toe that far into the door to a woman’s heart it is his own fault if he does not open it all the way.

Only there is this word of warning: Never pop the question to the business girl in the morning of a sunshiny day when she has on a new frock and a good hat and everything is going swimmingly at the office and she feels fit and fine and ready to buck the world. Instead, choose a rainy evening, when she is sitting alone at home, dejected and forlorn, when she is tired and the boss has been grumpy. Then the thing she wants most on earth is just a nice, strong masculine shoulder to cry on.

If the girl you want is a flapper, your best ally is your bankbook. All you need to look good to her is to be a good spender and a fast worker. Hold not your hand and count not the cost of jewelry and trinketry and candy and flowers and cabarets and eats and joy-rides, and remember that the man with the longest purse wins. Some day she will jazz with you to the preacher, and you will live scrappily ever afterward.

If the girl upon whom your affections are set is a demure little Puritan, make her your Mother Confessor. Confide to her all your sins, real and imaginary. Invent a dark past for her benefit. Make her believe that but for her Sacred Influence you would become an abandoned character and that she alone can lead you up to the higher life. All women have the reformation complex, and the better they are and the less they know of the world the harder they fall for the belief that a grown man’s character is like a piece of dough that they can mold into any shape they please. Once let a girl get the idea into her head that she is responsible for your soul, and she is yours for the taking.

If the girl you want is one that you made mud pies with in childhood and went to school with, and who refuses to see you in a sentimental light, don’t be discouraged by her telling you that she will be a sister to you. Just keep right on strutting your Rachel-and-Jacob stuff. Mighty few women can resist that. Make yourself a habit with the girl. Make yourself necessary to her happiness and comfort by always paying her the little attentions that women like. Fetch and carry for her. Be the one person in the world she can always depend upon to make life pleasant and agreeable for her.

Then suddenly drop her cold. Begin paying furious attentions to some woman she always accuses of being made up and older than she looks and an artful hussy, and it is a hundred-to-one bet that she will call you back and let you see that her feelings toward you were not at all what she had supposed they were. For when she thinks you are about to marry another woman she will wake up to the fact that life will be cinders, ashes and dust without you.

If the girl you desire is one of the morbid sort who hangs between “I will” and “I won’t,” who is always vivisecting her heart and taking her emotional temperature, what you need to use is caveman methods. She is just dying to have you drag her to the altar by the hair of her head, and if you are half a man you will do it. Don’t ever ask that kind of a woman to marry you. Tell her you are going to marry her and that you have the license and the ring in your pocket and are on the way to the chapel with her, and you will give her a thrill that will last a lifetime.

These are only a few of the many ways to win a wife. It is dead easy, and any man can do it who has gumption enough to work out a cross-word puzzle.

LVI

DANGEROUS GIRLS

Chief among the women from whom a young man should pray his guardian angel to deliver him is the Hinting Girl. She is a gentle grafter who holds up every man she meets with a pair of innocent-looking blue eyes that bid him stand and deliver just as effectually and efficiently as if he were looking down the barrels of a couple of blue-nosed revolvers in the hands of a highway robber. You will find these cheerful workers, son, where you least expect them. The very highest society is filled with girls of undisputed position and unquestioned morals, who ruthlessly plunder every man they meet, and you will never encounter an individual more to be feared than these bandits of the parlor.

Did you ever wonder why one girl receives so many more presents than another, and why every man who passes lays some offering on her shrine? Take it from me, this is the result of science and not mere chance. Observe, closely, and you will see, when you call, that she steers the conversation artfully around to the latest play, and before you know it you have offered to take her to it.

Also, she has let you know that violets are her favorite flower, and the date of her birthday. Before Christmas she artlessly confides in you where there is the jeweled vanity, or the hand-painted fan, that she has set her heart upon, and she couldn’t shout it at you any plainer if she bawled it to you through a megaphone that she expects you to come across, and will think you a piker if you don’t.

Beware the Hinting Girl, son. She is the woman who is accessory before the crime of half of the embezzlements of trusted clerks who go wrong, and who, if she got her deserts, would stand in the prisoners’ dock by the side of the poor, weak, trembling boy who has stolen to buy her jewels or to give her a good time. And she makes the sort of wife whose husband rises up and sits down to a never-ending chant of “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!”

Then there’s the Girl With a Past. Very often she has been more sinned against than sinning. Probably her morals are just as good as your own, son; but, even so, such marriages rarely turn out happily. For we have to face the naked fact that, while a man may love a woman well enough to forget and forgive her indiscretions, society, which is not in love with her, remembers them all. And it reminds her husband that it recalls them. The man who marries a Woman With a Past is pretty much in the same fix as the man who hires a reformed embezzler to be his cashier. He hopes he will run straight, but he keeps an eye on the cash box—a situation which doesn’t make for domestic felicity. Of course, there are women who reform and gather in their wild oats crops and ever after raise nothing but garden truck around their doorstep, but even while their husbands are devouring their domestic cabbages and onions there rarely comes a family spat in which they do not throw in their wives’ teeth the kind of farmers they have been. The truth is that it takes a big man and woman to defy the conventions. That is what makes it safest for those of us who are little people to play the game according to the rules laid down by Hoyle. And one of these rules is that women must keep their skirts clean. By and large it is a good rule, son, for it means the purity of race, the integrity of society and a lot of other things that keep this old world going.

Then there’s the Weeping Girl. Whenever you meet with a gentle, sweet, soft, babyish-looking little girl, with a chin that trembles and big eyes that overflow with tears at the slightest provocation, and who can cry without her nose getting red, fly, son, fly. She will fasten herself upon you, and when you try to make a getaway she will cling to you and weep. And no man can behold unmoved a woman crying for him, because he is such a good thing. You will stop to wipe her eyes; and all will be over with you except the long, long years of rainy matrimony when you will have to deal with a wife who cannot be reasoned with or cajoled or coerced into doing anything she doesn’t want to do, because you will be so afraid of starting another freshet of tears.

Then there’s the Domestic Girl, who baits her hook with angels’ food. You might go farther and do worse than marry the Domestic Girl, for while romance is transient one’s appetite remains, and after one’s illusions are gone it is a comfortable thing to have a good dinner to fall back upon. Still, one must confess, the Domestic Girl is apt to have only a bread-and-butter conversation, of which a man might tire in time; so, unless your stomach is developed in excess of your heart, walk warily when the Domestic Girl begins to inveigle you into little meals for two that she cooks for you under a pink-shaded lamp.

Lastly, there is the girl who is just near you—the girl you work with, or who lives in the same boarding house with you, or who comes to visit your sister. Men who have escaped the dangers of all other women are the victims of propinquity which unites them to ladies they couldn’t otherwise have seen through a telescope. Somehow our very nearness to the people with whom we are thrown every day keeps us from getting a perspective on their faults and disabilities, and habit deceives us into thinking that they are more necessary to us than they are. And so we drift into the mismated marriages that keep the divorce courts busy and the world salted down with the brine of our tears.

Therefore, if you perceive that Mamie, whom you thought vulgar at first, no longer gets on your nerves; if you observe that Sadie, who bored you when you first met her, is beginning to interest you with her chatter about what “he said” and “I said,” and you discover that you have quit being shocked by Carrie’s gum-chewing and Mabel’s grammar, then, son, pack your trunk and leave while the leaving is good. Otherwise, the Girl Next to You will get you sure.

But why amplify the list? Some day a girl will tag you, and you will know you are “it,” and a million warnings could not save you from your fate.

LVII

WHEN A GIRL LOVES A MAN

A youth asks me how he can tell whether a girl loves him or not. Well, son, you can’t always tell. There are times when all signs fail, and there is no man so clever, so discerning, so sophisticated that a woman cannot fool him if she set her mind to doing so. For the many generations in which women were entirely subservient to men, and in which they had to get everything they had out of men, and in which all their pleasures and perquisites depended on their wheedling and cajoling men, have made them gifted liars and adept at befooling men.

However, the modern girl, being able to make her own living, and stand upon her own feet, and therefore being to a large degree independent of men, has less need to simulate emotions which she does not feel, and so she has lost the fine technique of her mother and her grandmother and her great-great-great grandmother. Flirting has become a lost art, and the methods of the gold-digger are so crude and raw that any man who is taken in by one deserves all he gets. The average girl is almost brutally frank about the state of her feelings. She hasn’t even subtlety enough about her to keep a man guessing.

But there is, of course, a sort of no-man’s land that lies between liking and loving in which the girl wanders, herself as uncertain and bewildered as you are. And, I take it, it is across this dangerous terrain that you wish to be guided. Sally is dear and sweet to you. She apparently enjoys your society, and you never have any trouble in making dates with her. She is the best little pal ever. But what you want to know is whether she cares for you just as she does for half a dozen other chaps, or whether you are the ONLY ONE.

First, Is she willing to sit at home of an evening with you or not? If she comes down with her hat on to receive you, or if she always wants to step out somewhere, you have not touched her heart. She regards you merely as a purveyor of good times, a theater ticket and a dancing partner, and any other youth who had the price would do as well. But things have got serious with her when she proposes to spend the evening at home under a pink-shaded lamp. That shows that she has begun to live a romance with more thrills to it than anything she can see depicted on the stage, and that she thinks that Valentino is a poor dub at love-making compared to you. Also it indicates that she desires to isolate you, to cut you out from the herd and put her brand upon you. Cupid is essentially a monopolist. Especially the Lady Cupid. The first thing that a woman does when she falls in love with a man is to try to shut him away from all other women. So long as a girl wants to go in crowds there is nothing doing with her in the love line. If she really cares for you, she will maneuver to get you off to herself.

Next. Observe how a girl treats your pocketbook. If she gets everything out of you that she can; if, when you go out, she has to have a taxi to convey her three blocks, although she can walk ten miles around a department store without turning a hair; if she always suggests orchids when flowers are mentioned, and invariably picks out the most expensive places to dance and the highest-priced dishes on the menu, you may be certain that she has no serious intentions concerning you. You are merely the good thing that a merciful Providence has brought forward for her sustenance. But when a girl begins to talk economy to a boy; when she suggests going to the movies instead of to the theatre; when she orders a ham sandwich instead of a chicken breast and mushrooms under glass, it is an unmistakable sign that she is regarding his bankroll as her own and is commencing to save up for furniture for her future home.

Next—and this is an acid test—talk to the girl about yourself and observe her reaction to it. Monologue along to her by the hour about what you are doing, about what you have done in the past and what you expect to do in the future. Tell her all about what you said to the boss and what the boss said to you. Explain to her all the details of the grocery business. Regale her with reminiscences of your childhood, when you were a fat little boy with green freckles on your hands.

If she yawns in your face or if she listens with the expression of a martyr being nailed to the cross; if she gets up and walks around the room or turns on the radio or interrupts you to ask what you think of the President’s foreign policy, you may as well abandon hope. Her affection is merely gold plated, not the real thing. But if she laps up your talk about yourself and asks for more; if she begs you to repeat that darling story of how naughty you were to your nurse, and if she sits, goggle-eyed with excitement, on the edge of her chair while you relate how you sold a bill of goods to a hard customer, rest assured that her heart is yours for keeps. For there are only two women in the world, a man’s mother and the woman who is his wife or hopes to be his wife, who want to hear him talk about himself.

Take note also of a girl’s attitude toward you. As long as she regards you as an intelligent, husky, able-bodied man, capable of taking care of yourself and with sense enough to come in out of the rain, her regard for you is merely platonic. But when a girl suddenly becomes anxious about the state of your health, when she worries over your getting your feet wet and is afraid you are not getting enough vitamines in your diet, when she warns you not to forget to put on your overcoat if it is cold and to look out for automobiles when you cross the street, then it is safe to begin pricing engagement rings.

Of course, there are other signs of love, such as a girl developing an acute attack of domesticity and passing up the display of French frocks in a window for that of aluminum pots and pans, and especially when she begins dragging a man to church with her, which are not to be ignored. But when a maiden begins to mother a chap and indicates that her idea of spending a perfectly hilarious evening is just to be alone with him, listening to him talk about himself, she is his for the taking.

LVIII

MARRIAGE LESSONS

What has marriage taught you?

“The chief thing that marriage has taught me,” said a man who has had forty years of experience in matrimony, “is that women are human beings. When a man acquires that piece of information it always gives him a bit of a jolt, for most men never really think of women as human beings at all. They think, according to their kind, of women as angels, above all earthly passions, with no nerves or tempers, or selfish cravings for pleasure and who find their joy in life in loving the unlovable and forgiving the unforgivable and being a sweet, gooey, sticky mass of gentleness and patience and unselfishness. Or they think of women as being baby dolls to be dressed up and played with and put on the shelf when they are tired of them. Or they think of women as pieces of household machinery—sort of automatic, self-starting cooks and carpet sweepers and washers and menders, who run on their own power and who don’t even have to be oiled up with a few lubricating words of praise now and then.

“And so husbands treat their wives according to their conception of what women are, and that is why marriage is so often a failure and why there are so many divorces. Women don’t want to be regarded either as saints or toys or domestic conveniences. They want to be treated as human beings and have their husbands give them the same sort of a square deal a man gives his business partner.

“About nine-tenths of the spats that married people have are over money. It gets on the husband’s nerves to have the woman eternally dunning him for money. It seems to him that before he gets his hat off in the evening she begins asking for a few dollars for this and for that. Then the bills come in, and they are always bigger than he expected, and he rows about it, and she thinks that he is stingy.

“The trouble is that the man isn’t treating his wife like a rational human being. He is expecting her to be a miracle worker and run a house on air. He is humiliating her and making her feel that he is a tyrant by making her come like a beggar to him for every penny because he has got an idea that women don’t mind panhandling. Furthermore, he is expecting her to gauge her expenditures wisely, when she hasn’t the faintest idea of what her resources are.

“I have found out that it saves friction over money to make my wife as liberal an allowance as I can. I have found out that if you will explain to a woman just exactly how the financial situation stands in the family and why you can’t afford the thing she wants she will not only do without it gladly but cut down her expenses in other ways and help you to save. It is believing that their husbands are holding out on them and not splitting fifty-fifty with them that makes women reckless spenders.

“And I have found that a man is a fool who lies to his wife. In the end she always catches up with him, and then she imagines things ten times worse than they were. If a man telephones his wife that he is going to stay downtown and meet a customer from Oshkosh and she learns that he really played poker with the boys she pictures a scene of wild debauchery and leaps to the conclusion that he is leading the double life and he never hears the last of it. But if he tells her just what he is going to do she is so flattered at being trusted and thought broadminded enough not to begrudge her husband an evening’s pleasure that she goes to bed and goes to sleep instead of waiting up for him with a curtain lecture sizzling in her mind.

“Marriage has taught me that women think more of words than they do of deeds and that a woman would rather have her husband tell her that he loves her than to have him work his fingers to the bone for her and never make her a soft speech. As long as a husband tells his wife how beautiful she is and how he would like to deck her out in diamonds and sables she is perfectly content to do without them and wear hand-me-downs. It is only when she thinks that he doesn’t care whether she has fine clothes or not that she gets peevish over not having the finery that other women have.

“Marriage has taught me that in the family circle the hammer is a boomerang that returns and annihilates the hammerer. If you knock your wife’s cooking she says, ‘What’s the use of trying to please you?’ and makes no effort to improve; but if you praise her dinners she breaks her neck trying to make them better and better. If you criticize the size of the bills she revenges herself by buying something that really cost money; but if you tell her what a help she is to you and what a marvelous manager, she becomes a nickel-nurser.

“If you find fault with her hat or her dress, you have to buy her a new one; but if you tell her how becoming her last year’s costume is and how it brings out her lines, she will wear it into shreds. Marriage has taught me that if you let your wife know that you admire her and appreciate her, that you are grateful to her for all that she does for you and that you try to do all in your power to make her happy, she will repay you a thousandfold and there is nothing she won’t do for you and no fault she won’t overlook in you.”

LIX

THE SUPERIOR BUSINESS WOMAN

The other day a man killed his beautiful young wife because she was a better “business man” than he was and made more money. The woman loved her husband and was good to him. She was ambitious for him. She got him a job with the people for whom she worked and tried to push him along and help him in every way. But it simply was not in him to be the go-getter that she was. She was a success and he was a failure. And in the frenzy of morbid jealousy that this engendered in him, he slew her.

Thus vividly do we have brought to our attention one of the new difficulties that the advent of women into the business world has injected into the already complicated matrimonial proposition. It makes the question of how the modern wife can best be a helpmeet to her husband one that takes a Solomon in petticoats to answer. In olden times the matter was perfectly simple. The woman who wanted to help her husband along had only to be a good and thrifty manager, to pare the potatoes thin enough and squeeze the nickels. She did her part in building up the family fortunes by saving. But, in many cases to-day, the old woman’s granddaughter is a crackerjack business woman who sees that she can help her husband more by earning than by scrimping, and that she can make more money in one year in business than she could save in ten years by doing her own housework and wearing shabby clothes. So, as long as she is working for their common good, the woman cannot understand why her husband shouldn’t be just as willing for her to help him by working in an office as in a kitchen, or why the wife who does brain labor isn’t as good a wife as the one who does manual labor.

But the great majority of women who continue to follow any gainful pursuit after marriage find out that, while there is a new woman who looks at everything in life from a new angle, there is no new man. Women have changed in their relationship to man, but men stand pat just where Adam did when it comes to dealing with women.

If you will notice, it is only women who prate about equality between the sexes. Men take no stock in any such heresy. When a man tells a woman that she is an angel and that he looks up to her and worships her, it is one of the lover’s perjuries at which Jove laughs. In reality he doesn’t mean a word of it. The very basic thing on which a man’s love for a woman is built is his sense of superiority to her. He wants to feel stronger than she is, wiser than she is, to be more successful than she is. She must look up to him, revere him, ask his opinion, be guided by his advice.

That is why the clinging-vine type of woman is so appealing to men, and it is why intelligent, big-brained men so often marry morons and are happy and contented with them. Their silly little wives do not understand one word in five they say and are no companions to them, but they satisfy the masculine demand to dominate the woman. When the case is reversed, as it often is, and when the wife is the more intelligent, the stronger character—when the gray mare is the better horse and pulls most of the load—the marriage is invariably unhappy, and the husband almost invariably either openly or secretly hates his wife. His love for her is never strong enough to survive the hurt to his vanity. His sense of inferiority to her keeps his nerves raw, and if he is dependent upon her it turns his very soul to wormwood and gall. I have never known a woman who supported her husband who received any gratitude for it. He would eat her bread, but he did it as a snapping dog that bites the hand that feeds it.

There is nothing that fills a woman’s cup of happiness so full and overflowing as for her husband to achieve a notable success and be great and famous. She glories in being Mrs. Explorer or Mrs. Engineer or Mrs. Banker or Mrs. Author, and loves to shine in the reflected glory. But the deadliest insult you can offer any man is to speak of him as his wife’s husband and call him Mr. Mary Smith, although Mary may have written the book of the year or have performed some achievement that has made the world sit up and take notice of her.

Perhaps all of this is natural. Perhaps this cosmic urge that the male has to dominate the female is something instinctive for which he is not responsible.

But it makes the woman’s course a hard one to steer, for, curiously enough, the weak man is often attracted to the strong woman, and there is something maternal in the strong woman that wants to mother the weak man and makes her feel that he only needs her to take care of him and boost him and show him the way to success.

So the girl who is making a big salary marries the man who is making a small one, and she tries to supply for him the business sense he lacks and to galvanize him into a hustle of which he is incapable, and they live scrappily ever afterward. Yet there is nothing we can do about it as long as nature goes blundering along putting the brains and talents of merchants and bankers and trust presidents into a lot of women’s heads and making plenty of men who would have been wonderful housekeepers and done perfectly lovely embroidery work if only they hadn’t got the wrong sex.

LX

NEW IDEALS FOR OLD

The strangest thing in this age of strange things is the new relationship that is growing up between the sexes. So many of the ideals that have ruled us for centuries have been scrapped and swept into the discard that the boy and girl babies of to-day are virtually born into a new world where few of the conventions that ruled their parents survive. Take the matter of financial independence, for instance. Since the caveman days it has been held that the proper attitude of woman was one of dependence on her lord and master. The woman bore the children and kept the house, and the husband provided the wherewithal to support the family. When a woman had property her husband took possession of it on the day they were married. Virtually every lucrative occupation was barred to women. When a man and a woman went to any place of amusement the man would have been highly insulted if she had offered to pay any part of the cost of the entertainment. Man was the purse bearer, and his lordly gesture indicated that he had the checking account of Mr. Rockefeller and that woman was a dear little sweetie who was not to bother her poor little foolish head over the cost of anything.

To-day the majority of women earn their living before they are married. Financial independence has become so necessary to their happiness that one of the potent sources of domestic discord is the inability of the woman who has had her own pay envelope to do without it and reconcile herself to taking whatever her husband gives her as recompense for her hard work as a poor man’s wife. Also husbands are coming more and more to begrudge spending money on their wives and are demanding oftener and oftener that the wage-earning girls they marry shall keep on with their jobs. Likewise, it is a common thing for the young women who go out with young men to places of amusement to pay their own way and go fifty-fifty on all expenses.

This may be fair enough. Certainly, when men and women work side by side and the woman gets the same salary as the man there is no more reason why he should feed her and buy her theater tickets than why she should buy his. Perhaps it is only logical that when woman fought for and won financial independence she should have to pay the price of her victory. But what I am trying to show is that man’s attitude toward woman as regards money has changed. She has shown that she can make her own living and he lets her do it. Even fathers have now no such sense of responsibility about providing for their daughters as they used to have. Men no longer adopt the gallant “I’ll-pay-your-way” pose. They treat women about money as they would treat another man. Of course, the occupation of wifehood and motherhood is a strenuous one and is all that any woman can be expected to do properly, but it is becoming more and more evident that men are less willing to support their families and that in the future women are going to have to continue to be wage-earners even after they are married.

Another curious shift of masculine thought is about feminine modesty. In the past, no matter what a man’s own life might have been, he demanded unsullied innocence in the woman he married. His ideal was the shrinking violet, the bud with the dew upon it. In these days there are few peaches with the down still left upon them. They have nearly all been manhandled. Girls display their bodies with an abandon that would have made the most hardened woman blush fifty years ago. Debutantes tell stories that would paralyze their grandmothers if they could hear them. Young women think no more of kissing every Tom, Dick and Harry who comes along and in indulging in petting parties and “necking,” than their mothers would have thought of shaking hands and holding a casual conversation. Girls excuse themselves for indulging in these dangerous and degrading practises by saying that unless they do they receive no attention from men. They speak the truth. Men may still theoretically admire what they call “the old-fashioned girl,” but they leave her to spend her evenings with her parents. Few men in these days can hope to marry a girl who has not been kissed and pawed over, and so it is obvious that men are changing their opinions about the desirability of modesty in women and establishing a single standard of conduct for both sexes. That is just, but it does not make for morality or the uplift of humanity.

Men and women both approach marriage in a different spirit. In the back of most young people’s heads as they march to the altar is the thought that if they don’t like it they won’t stick to it. It is an experiment, and they will try anything once, and if it doesn’t come up to what the novelists and poets have press-agented it to be they can always fly to the divorce court. That is one reason why marriage is so often a failure. Neither husband nor wife makes an honest effort to make a success of it. Of course, there are exceptions to all rules. There are husbands who gladly support their families; there are girls who have kept themselves unsullied and their lips virginal; there are men and women who still hold marriage a sacrament. But for the great majority of men and women there are new ideals and a new attitude toward each other. And whether these are better or worse than the old only time can tell.

LXI

WHY DIVORCE IS COMMON

When we hear about a couple getting a divorce on the grounds of incompatibility of temper we instinctively feel that it is too trivial a reason for breaking up a home and we condemn them as poor sports who did not have enough grit to carry on and make the best of their bargain. If it had been something big, now—drunkenness, the drug habit, infidelity—if the husband had been a brute who beat his wife, or the wife a virago, we could have sympathized with them. But just to get a divorce because they didn’t think alike on politics and religion and hadn’t the same taste in pie. Pooh! Quitters. A yellow streak. We’ve no pity for them.

Yet when you come to think of it, is there really anything else in the whole wide world that comes so near to justifying divorce as incompatibility of temper? Is there any other such good reason for a man and woman parting and going their separate ways as the fact that they have not one thought or desire or interest in common? And is there any other torture comparable with having to live in intimate daily contact with a person who continually rubs your fur the wrong way, who gets on your nerves, who rasps your sensibilities and keeps you in a perpetual bad humor? It is a lot easier to forgive an occasional big fault than it is to put up with never-ending petty irritations. The big sinners at least take a day off from their vices now and then, but the little sinners who sin against our habits and ideals and conventions are always on the job. So when you think of this and consider the difficulties there are in the way of every man and woman who get married adjusting themselves to each other, you are not surprised that divorce is so common. You only wonder that it isn’t universal.

Here are two persons of different sexes, doomed by nature to look at everything from different standpoints and to react differently to every situation. Back of them is a different heredity, often a different race. In their veins flow alien currents of blood. They have been brought up with different standards, in different schools of thought. Different habits have been bred in them. They worship different gods and at different altars and eat different dishes.

What marvel that such a couple come to grief on the rocks of incompatibility of temper! The miracle of it is that any of them have the wit and wisdom to steer around it. But the terrible and pathetic thing about it is that in hundreds of these cases in which husbands and wives live a cat-and-dog life and make each other perfectly miserable, or else break their marriage vows, nobody is really to blame. Each is perfectly right from his or her standpoint, only they can’t agree. They can’t adjust themselves to each other. The woman who has been brought up in a happy-go-lucky household, where the only use any one saw for a dollar was to spend it as quickly as possible, where meals were movable feasts that were as likely to happen at one hour as another, is a thorn in the side of a husband who has been trained from his youth up to make a fetich of thrift, order and promptness.

On the other hand, the woman whose mother has brought her up to make a sacred rite of cleanliness and who scrubs the back of every kitchen shelf and regards a chair out of place or ashes on the rug as a high crime and misdemeanor, is fretted into nervous prostration by a husband who never can be taught to wipe his feet on the doormat or kept from mussing up the best sofa cushion.

There are women who die of broken hearts, frozen to death by the coldness of their husbands. They have come from warm-hearted, demonstrative families. They have been accustomed to having a fuss made over them and to seeing their father’s loverlike attentions to their mother, and they think that their husbands do not love them, because they never tell them so. They cannot understand the dumb, repressed temperament that is utterly incapable of showing what it feels. Then there is the gay, pleasure-loving man who likes to dance and dine in restaurants and jazz; the good fellow whom everybody likes and who has holes in his pockets that no wife’s economy can ever sew up. What superhuman wisdom and patience it takes in a woman to keep from nagging him if she has been brought up in an austere family that frowned on all frivolous amusements and whose watchword was duty instead of good times!

Then there is the eternal conflict over little trivial personal habits and ways, over things as small as cooking. Irvin Cobb said once that the Civil War was fought not over secession or slavery but over hot bread and cold bread. Certainly many thirty or forty-year family wars are waged over what strength the breakfast coffee shall be and the use of onions in the soup. And certainly it is no trivial matter for one accustomed to a sophisticated, highly cultured cuisine to have to insult your palate with plain, ignorant, boiled food because the partner of your bosom has had his or her early education in eating neglected. Probably no woman who has been reared in the belief that one’s good clothes should be kept for company and that any sort of old messy duds were good enough for home consumption can realize the disgust she inspires in her husband’s breast when she comes down to breakfast in a boudoir cap and a soiled kimono and no complexion if he is of the fastidious sort to whom slovenliness is a mortal sin.

These little things—the niceties of life that one has been taught to observe and the other hasn’t, the order and thrift one has been bred to and the other hasn’t, the difference in point of view, in taste, in habit—make the inevitable friction between husbands and wives which is at the bottom of almost every divorce. And when you think how hard it is to give up our old opinions and ways of doing things, the wonder is that so many persons are able to do it and that so many couples do adjust themselves to each other and get along in reasonable peace and harmony.

LXII

THE CHILDREN PAY

No disinterested outsider ever observes the spats in which so many husbands and wives continually engage without realizing that they quarrel because they enjoy doing so. It is an indoor sport out of which they get a morbid thrill. Domestic life has become dull and monotonous to them. They have nothing new and interesting to say to each other, and so one or the other starts something by making a remark that he or she knows is the fighting word that will inevitably precipitate a scrimmage. And then they go to it, hammer and tongs. It is their way of putting pep into a pepless day, for they know the danger they are running, and the very fact that they are risking their whole life’s happiness crisps their nerves, as going over the top did the soldiers in the war. Besides which they get a strange and savage joy out of stabbing with cruel words and in wounding and being wounded by the ones they love and who love them.

It is because married couples love a fight for the fight’s sake that so many homes are nothing but a battlefield on which a perpetual warfare goes on. Otherwise the dove of peace would roost on the roof of many a household to which the black flag is now nailed. For it is folly to say that the average husband and wife who are forever engaged in an acrimonious debate over every trifle that comes up could not get along with each other if they desired to do so. They get along with other persons. They make allowance for the prejudices and faults of others. They permit other persons to differ from them on matters of opinion and taste. They sidestep other persons’ peculiarities. They control their tempers and their tongues when they are dealing with others. They are tactful and diplomatic in handling other persons. No doctor would ever have another patient, no merchant another customer, no man could hold his job if he was as irritable, as grouchy, as high tempered abroad as many a man is at home, and if he said the insulting things to other persons that he says to his wife. No woman would ever be invited to another bridge party or elected president of the sewing society if she were as much of a spitfire in public as many a woman is in private, and if she said the nasty things to others that she says to her husband.

Now, the rules for keeping the peace are the same everywhere, and both men and women are familiar with them. Every man knows that there isn’t a woman living that he can’t make eat out of his hand by showing her a few attentions, a little tenderness and consideration and paying her a few compliments. Every woman knows that there isn’t a man that she can’t jolly along the way she wants him to go and who does not respond to judiciously applied salve. So when husbands and wives, who know perfectly well how to work each other without friction, deliberately and with malice aforethought rub each other the wrong way, it is obviously because they enjoy their daily dozen fracases and find fun in seeing the fur fly. If that were the end of it, we might well shrug our shoulders and, while wondering at their taste, leave them to take their pleasure as they saw fit in the cruel pastime of baiting each other. But, unfortunately, the family spat is not the innocent diversion that husbands and wives appear to think it is, nor does it end when the husband puts on his hat and bangs the door behind him and goes downtown, and the wife wipes away a tear or two and goes about her daily tasks.

The children are the real victims in these family fights. It is they who stumble from the domestic battleground with shattered nerves, with torn and bleeding spirits and souls, with maimed and deformed characters. All of us have known children who have taken to the streets almost as soon as they could walk to escape homes that were full of bickering and discord. We have seen how little control the fathers and mothers who could not control their own tempers had over their children, and we have not wondered when truant officers tell us that nine-tenths of the wayward girls and hoodlum boys are the children of divorced parents, or else, of parents who did not get along together. Now comes a great psychiatrist who asserts that he has never known an instance of nervous breakdown in the children of happily married parents who were brought up in a peaceful home.

Read that over again. Memorize it, you fathers and mothers who begin the day by having a row at the breakfast table because the coffee isn’t just as you like it or the toast is burnt or you neglected to send up the coal yesterday and forgot to leave the money for the milkman. You think it is of no consequence because your wife knows you don’t mean half of what you say and she is fighting back more from force of habit than anything else. But neither one of you gives a thought to the children who are listening to it all, to the children who are learning to regard you with contempt, who are having all their illusions shattered; whom you are teaching to be bitter and misanthropic, with no faith in anything beautiful or fine. You do not realize that you may not only be giving them a warp in character that will bar them from success in life, but that you may be actually dooming them to a breakdown that will make them wrecks in body and mind.

Isn’t that a pretty high price to pay for the pleasure of quarreling? And isn’t it a cruelly unfair thing to force your children to settle your score? For the sake of the children you brought into the world and for whom you are responsible, isn’t it worth while to deny yourself the pleasure of finding fault with your husband or wife and saying all the mean, acrimonious things you can think of? No use in saying that you can’t get along together. You can, if you want to. You get along with other persons.

LXIII

THE LEARNED PROFESSION OF HOME-MAKING