Part 33

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.

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.