Part 28

They raised up spoiled, selfish sons who have never considered another human being but themselves. These two, with undisciplined wills, unrestrained tempers, undirected impulses, marry each other, and they fight like cats and dogs. Observation shows that either a husband or a wife who controls himself or herself can save almost any marriage, and it takes no prophet to foretell that mothers could insure their children’s domestic happiness by teaching them iron bound self-control.

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.