Chapter IV: Part 4

I do not believe in a forced morality, save as a protection to a community. I believe in it as a legal fence, but it possesses no value as a religious motive. It helps to save society some annoyance, but it does not materially improve the condition of humanity. Such improvements must come from the desire of men and women to reach higher standards. So, after you have planted a little seed in the mind of the mercenary Magdalene which may in time sprout and grow, pass on, and find those who have gone wrong from other causes, and who are longing for a hand to lead them right.

And of all things do not expect a girl who has lived in the glare of red lights, and listened to the blare of bands, and worn the ofttimes becoming garb of folly, and stimulated her spirits with intoxicants--do not expect her, I say, to suddenly be contented with quiet and solitude, and drudgery, and cheap, unlovely garments, and goodness. Give her something to entertain her and to occupy her mind, give her something to live for and hope for and to be pleased over, besides the mere fact of reformation. The opium victim, you must remember, can not at once partake of wholesome food and be well and happy in the thought that he has given up his drug. Neither can the folly victim. The standards of happiness and contentment which the moral woman has always found satisfactory, she too often considers sufficient for the sister who has wandered from the path. But they are standards which, once lost, must be gained step by step, painfully and slowly. They are not reached by a bound. As much as possible keep your reformed sister's mind from dwelling on the past, or from talking of her mistakes and sins. Blot them from her memory by new and interesting plans and occupations. The way to live a new life is to live it.

And our thoughts and conversation are important parts of living. Instead of praying aloud to God to forgive her sins, show the God spirit in yourself by forgiving and forgetting and helping her to forget.

And now a word about yourself.

You are twenty-four, lovely, sympathetic, fond of children and animals, wholesome and normal in your habits, without crankiness, and popular with both sexes. While there are many wives and widows possessed of these qualities, there seems to be some handicap to the spinster in the race of life who undertakes to arrive at middle age with all the womanly attributes. Almost invariably she drops some of them by the wayside. She becomes overorderly and fussy--so that association with her for any length of time is insupportable--or careless and indifferent. Or she may grow inordinately devoted to animal pets, and bitter and critical toward children and married people.

She may develop mannish traits, and dress and appear more like a man than a feminine woman.

She may ride a hobby, to the discomfort of all other equestrians or pedestrians on the earth's highway. She may grow so argumentative and positive that she is intolerant and intolerable. And whichever of these peculiarities are hers, she is quite sure to be wholly unconscious of it, while she is quick to see that of another. Now watch yourself, my dear Sybyl, as you walk alone toward middle life; do not allow yourself to grow queer or impossible. It was God's intent that every plant should blossom and bear fruit, and that every human being should mate and produce offspring. The plant that fails in any of its functions is usually blighted in some way, and the woman who fails of life's full experiences seems to show some repellent peculiarity. But she need not, once she sets a watch upon herself; she has a conscious soul and mind, and can control such tendencies if she will.

It is unnatural for a woman to live without the daily companionship of man. The superior single woman must make tenfold the effort of the inferior wife, to maintain her balance into maturity, because of her enforced solitude. As the wife-mother grows older she is kept in touch with youth, and with the world, while the opportunities for close companionship with the young lessen as a single woman passes forty, unless she makes herself especially adaptable, agreeable, and sympathetic.

And this is what I want you to do. At twenty-four it is none too soon to begin planning for a charming maturity.

If you are determined upon a life of celibacy, determine also to be the most wholesome, and normal, and all around liberal, womanly spinster the world has ever seen.

Peace and happiness to you in your chosen lot.

To Mrs. Charles Gordon

_Concerning Her Sister and Her Children_

No, my dear Edna, I do not think it strange that you should seek advice on this subject from a woman who has no living children.

It seems to me no one is fitted to give such unbiased counsel regarding the training of children as the woman of observation, sympathy, and feeling, who has none of her own.

Had I offspring, I would be influenced by my own successes, and prejudiced by my own failures, and unable to put myself in your place, as I now do.

A mother rarely observes other people's children, save to compare them unfavourably with her own. I regret to say that motherhood with the average woman seems to be a narrowing experience, and renders her less capable of taking a large, unselfish view of humanity.

The soldier in the thick of battle is able to tell only of what he personally experienced and saw, just in the spot where he was engaged in action.

The general who sits outside the fray and watches the contest can form a much clearer idea of where the mistakes occurred, and where the greatest skill was displayed.

I am that general, my dear friend, standing outside the field of motherhood, and viewing the efforts of my battling sisters to rear desirable men and women. And I am glad you have appealed to me while your two children are yet babies to give you counsel, for I can tell you where thousands have failed.

And I thank you and your husband for reposing so much confidence in my ideas.

I think, perhaps, we had better speak of the postscript of your letter first. You ask my opinion regarding the chaperon for your sixteen-year-old sister, who is going abroad to study for a period of years. Mrs. Walton will take her and keep her in her home in Paris, and Miss Brown also stands ready to make her one of three young girls she desires to chaperon and guide through a foreign course of study in France and Germany.

You like the idea of having your sister in a home without the association of other American girls, until she perfects herself in French, but you are worried about Mrs. Walton's being a divorced woman. Miss Brown, the spotless spinster, seems the safer guide to your friends, you tell me.

I know the majority of women would feel that a single woman of good standing and ungossiped reputation was a safe and desirable protector for a young girl.

The same majority would hesitate to send their girls away with a divorced woman.

But as I remarked in the beginning, I have stood outside the fray and watched similar ventures, and I have grown to realize that it is not mere respectability and chastity in a woman which make her a safe chaperon for a young girl,--it is a deep, full, broad understanding of temperaments and temptations.

Had I a daughter or a sister like your sweet Millie, I would not allow her to live one year under the dominion of such a woman as Miss Brown for any consideration. Why? because Miss Brown is all brain and bigotry. She is narrow and high, not deep and broad.

She is so orthodox that she incites heresy in the rebellious mind of independent youth. She is so moral she makes one long for adventure. She would not listen to any questioning of old traditions, or any speculative philosophizing of a curious young mind, and she would be intolerant with any girl who showed an inclination to flirt or be indiscreet.

Your sister Millie is as coquettish as the rose that lifts its fair face to the sun, and the breeze, and the bee, and expects to be admired. She is as innocent as the rose, too, but that fact Miss Brown would never associate with coquetry.

She would class it with vulgarity and degeneracy. Miss Brown is a handsome woman, but she has no sex instincts. She does not believe with the scientist, "that in the process of evolution it is only with the coming of the sex relation that life is enabled to rise to higher forms."

She believes in brain and spirit, and is utterly devoid of that feminine impulse to make herself attractive to men, and wholly incapable of understanding the fascination that Folly holds out to youth. She has never experienced any temptation, and she would be shocked at any girl who fell below her standard.

She would carefully protect Millie from danger by high walls, but she would never eradicate the danger impulse from her nature by sympathetic counsel, as a more human woman could.

Mrs. Walton is a much better guide for your sister.

She ran away from boarding-school at seventeen, and married the reckless son of a rich man. She had a stepmother of the traditional type, and had never known a happy home life. She was of a loving and trusting and at the same time a coquettish nature, and she attracted young Walton's eye while out for a walk with a "Miss Brown" order of duenna. The duenna saw the little embryo flirtation, and became very much horrified, and preached the girl a long sermon, and set a close watch upon her actions.

There was no wise, loving guidance of a young girl's life barque from the reefs of adventure. It was homily and force. The result was, that the girl escaped from school before six weeks passed, and married her admirer.

He was fifteen years her senior, a reckless man of the world, even older in experience than in years. He proved a very bad husband, but his young wife remained with him until his own father urged her to leave him. She was quietly divorced, and has lived abroad almost ever since, and holds an excellent position in the French capital, as well as in other European centres, and she is most exemplary in her life. Mr. Walton is now an inmate of a sanitarium, a victim of paresis.

I can imagine no one so well fitted to exert the wisest influence upon Millie's life as Mrs. Walton.

There is a woman who has run the whole gamut of girlish folly, and who knows all the phases of temptation. She knows what it is to possess physical attractions, and to be flattered by the admiration of men, and she has passed through the dark waters of disillusion and sorrow. She would be the one to help Millie out of dangerous places by sympathy and understanding, instead of using sermons and keys.

She would mould her young, wax-like character by the warmth of love, instead of freezing it by austere axioms.

Miss Brown would make an indiscreet young girl feel hopelessly vulgar and immodest; Mrs. Walton that she understood all about her foolish pranks, and was able to lead her in the better paths.

Miss Brown prides herself upon never having lost her head with any man.

Mrs. Walton is like some other women I have known, who have made mistakes of judgment. She lost her head, but in the losing and the sorrow that ensued she found a heart for all humanity.

There are women in this world whose cold-white chastity freezes the poor wayfarer who tries to find in their vicinity rest and comfort and courage.

Other women cast a cooling shadow, in which the sun-scorched pilgrim finds peace--the shadow of a past error, from which spring fragrant ferns and sweet grasses, where tired and bleeding feet may softly tread.

Mrs. Walton's life casts the shadow of divorce on her pathway, but it is only the warm, restful shadow of a ripening and mellowing sorrow. Do not fear to have Millie walk in it.

It will be better for her than the steady glare from a glacier.

I find I have said so much about your sister that I must reserve my counsel about your children for another letter.

Your postscript was brief, but pregnant with suggestion, and called for this long reply.

I shall write you again in a few days.

To Mrs. Charles Gordon

_Concerning Her Children_

Your wish to have your son, who is now four years old, begin to develop the manly qualities, and your oldest daughter, who has reached the mature age of three, start wisely on the path to lovely womanhood, is far from being premature.

"The tree inclines as the twig is bent," we are told.

Most mothers wait until the tree is in blossom before they begin to train its inclination.

Your boy is quite old enough to be taught manly pride, in being useful to you and his sisters.

Such things are not successfully taught by preaching or scolding or punishing; but are more easily inculcated by tact and praise, object-lesson and play.

A four-year-old boy is all ears when his father's praises and achievements are recounted. Any father, save a brute, is a hero in the eyes of his four-year-old son. I am sure Mr. Gordon has many admirable traits you can use as interesting topics.

Tell little Charlie how proud you are to have a son who will be like his father, and attend to the needs of and look after the interests of his mother and sisters.

Make him think that to be of service to you or his sisters is one of the first steps toward manhood, as indeed it is.

When he performs any small kindness, praise his manliness.

Teach him to open doors, and to make way for women and elders, as a part of manly courtesy.

Speak with gentle disapproval of the unfortunately common type of American boy who pushes women and older people aside to scramble into public conveyances and secure a seat before them.

Say how proud you are that your son could not be guilty of such unmanly conduct.

When you are walking with him, call his attention to any woman or child or poor man in trouble, and if his services can be of use, urge him to offer them.

I saw one day a small boy spring to the aid of an old coloured woman who had dropped a lot of parcels in the street, and I thought it was a certain evidence that his mother was a rare and sweet woman. For the manners of little boys are almost invariably what their mothers make them.

Awake early in his heart a sympathy for the deformed, the crippled, and otherwise unfortunate beings.

There is no other country where such vulgar and heartless curiosity, and even ridicule, is bestowed upon grotesque or unsightly types of humanity, as in America.

A little dwarfed girl in New York City committed suicide a few years ago because she was so weary of being laughed at and ridiculed by her associates in the street and at school.

Think of that, in this Christian age, and in the metropolis of America!

An old street peddler was set upon by school-children and so annoyed and misused that he became insane.

Another was injured by street children--the children of the public schools--and died from the effects of their abuse.

This is the fault of mothers who have never deemed it their duty and privilege to awaken the tender and protective qualities in the character of their children.

Speak often to your boy of the pathos of dumb animals dependent upon human thoughtfulness for food, drink, and decent usage.

Say what a privilege it seems to you to be able to befriend them, and to be a voice for them in making others realize their duty to our dumb brothers.

Obtain interesting books on natural history and read stories of animal life to your boy. Instruct him in the habits of beast, bird, and insect, and talk to him of the wonderful domestic instincts and affections in many of our speechless associates. The exhilaration of the wild bird, and the happiness of the deer and the hare in the woods and fields, call to his mind day by day. It will be more gratifying to you when he is man grown to feel he is the loving friend and protector, rather than the skilled hunter of bird and beast.

The higher order of man does not seek slaughter for amusement. He realizes that he has no right to take, save for self-protection, that which he cannot give.

Make your son a higher order of man by developing those brain cells and leaving the destructive and cruel portions of the brain to shrink from lack of use.

Even in his play with his inanimate toys, you can be arousing the best or the worst part of your boy's nature.

The child who whips and screams at his hobby-horse usually, when a man, whips and bellows at his flesh and blood steed.

Tell him the play-horse is more easily managed by coaxing and petting, and that loud voices make it nervous and frightened.

Suggest water and feed at suitable times, and express sorrow for the horses with no kind boys to look out for them.

Start a humane society in the nursery and make your boy president and your little girl honorary member, and act as treasurer and secretary yourself.

Give him a medal when he offers food to a hungry street animal or speaks to a driver cruel to his horse, or performs any other kind act. This will be interesting play to your children, and it will be sowing seed in fallow ground.

Your baby girl is already old enough to take pride in picking up the toys she scatters, and putting her chair where it belongs. Make it a part of your hour of sport with her to help her do these things. She will not know she is being taught order.

I learned this lesson from a famous author whose baby son was anxious to play about the library where his father was at work.

The first act of the toddler was to toss all the books in sight upon the floor and to sit down and turn the leaves, hunting for pictures. This performance interested him for half an hour, when he proceeded to seek new fields of action.

"But now let us have great fun putting all the books back just where we found them," cried the tactful father, with a wink and a laugh, which made the child believe he was to enjoy the sport of his life. And it _was_ made sport by the foolish pranks of the father who knew how little it took to interest a child.

The next day, and the next, the same fall and rise in the book market took place, but on the fourth day the father was too deeply engrossed in work to assist in the replacing of the books: when, lo! the small lad, after a wistful waiting and unanswered call, proceeded to put the books all back alone.

_The first important brick in the foundation wall of order was laid_.

So you can teach your little girl all the womanly habits of method, and order, and neatness, and system, if you have the patience to act the part of playmate with her a few moments daily.

As she grows in understanding and years, keep yourself at her side, her nearest friend. Let her feel that she can express her every thought to you, and that every question which presents itself to her developing mind, you will seek to answer to the best of your ability.

Be her confidant, her adviser, her friend, and let her find pride and happiness in doing things for you.

Never act as maid or domestic to your daughter.

Be the queen and make her your first lady-in-waiting, and show her the courtesy and appreciation her position demands from royalty. She will be a better daughter, and a better wife and mother, later in life, if you do not make the mistake of the average American mother of waiting upon her from the cradle to the altar. Let her grow up with the quiet understanding that you are to be first considered, in matters social and financial. Your wardrobe must be as well looked after as her own, and if there is to be economy for one, let her practise it.

The daughter who has a whole household sacrificing and toiling for her pleasures is spoiled for a wife and woman. The most admirable young women I have known--and I have known many--are those who were taught to take it as a matter of course that the mother was first to be considered, and lovingly served.

Do not be afraid of making your daughter vain by telling her the attractive features she may possess.

Some one else will if you do not, and it is well for her to hear it from lips which may more successfully offer counsel afterward. A certain confidence in her own charms gives a sensibly reared young woman a poise and self-possession which is to be desired. A touch of feminine vanity renders a woman more anxious to please, and more alert to keep always at her best.

But beware of having her acquire egotism. Silly conceit is the death-blow to higher attainments and to all charm.

Teach your daughter early the accomplishment of listening well. She will be certain to please if she understands its value.

A woman who looks the converser in the eyes, and does not allow her glance to wander and become distrait, and who does not interrupt before the recital is finished, can be sure of popularity with both men and women.

Give both your son and daughter confidence in themselves and belief in their power to achieve. There is tremendous power in the early inoculation by the home influence of self-confidence, when it is tempered by modesty and consideration for others.

Remember whatever in your own bringing up seems to-day unfortunate, and avoid it in the training of your children.

Remember whatever was good and helpful, and emulate it.

To Miss Zoe Clayborn Artist

_Concerning the Attentions of Married Men_

I am sure, my dear niece, that you are a good and pure-minded girl, and that you mean to live a life above reproach, and I fully understand your rebellion against many of the conventional forms which are incompatible with the career of a "girl bachelor," as you like to call yourself. But let us look at the subject from all sides, while you are on the threshold of life, in the morning of your career, and before you have made any more serious mistakes than the one you mention.

For it was a mistake when you accepted Mr. Gordon's telephone message to lunch alone with him at a restaurant, even though you knew his wife might not object.

Mr. and Mrs. Gordon are happily married, parents of several children. They are broader and more liberal and more unselfish than most parents, and they went out of their path to extend courtesies to you, a young country girl--at first because you were my niece, then because they liked you personally.

When I first wrote Mrs. Gordon that you were to open a studio in Chicago after your course of study in the East, she expressed deep interest in you, and seemed anxious to have you consider her as a friend--always ready to act as a chaperon or adviser when you felt the need of wiser guidance than your own impulses.

Mrs. Gordon knew that your experience of the world was limited to a country village in the West, and two years' study at the Pratt Institute. While there she knew you boarded with a cousin of your mother's, and enjoyed the association and privileges of the daughters of the home.

To start alone in Chicago, and live in your studio, and dine from a chafing-dish, and sleep in an unfolded combination bureau and refrigerator--has more fascinations to your mind than to Mrs. Gordon's. She was reared in comfort, bordering on luxury, and while her early home life was not happy, she enjoyed all the refinements and all the privileges of protected girlhood.

She knows city life as you cannot know it, and, although she discards many of the burden-some conventions of society, she realizes the necessity of observing some of its laws.

She wanted you to feel that you had the background of a wholesome home, and the protection of clean, well-behaved married friends in your exposed situation; her attitude to you is just what she would want another woman to hold toward her daughter, were she grown up and alone in a large city.

You have been her guest, and she has been your good friend. Mr. Gordon admired you from the first, and that was a new incentive for this most tactful and liberal of wives to befriend you. She always cultivates the women he likes.

This is excellent policy on the part of a wife. If the husband has any really noble qualities or possesses a sterling character, he will appreciate and respect his wife's confidence, and never violate it; and added to this, he will usually become disillusioned with the women he has admired from a distance, when he sees them frequently at too close range.

A wife can make no greater mistake than trying to fence her husband about and obtruding high walls between him and the women he admires. Far better bring them near and turn on the calcium light.

Mr. Gordon is a born lover of the fair sex, a born gallant. He is, at the same time, a clean, self-respecting man. But he has grown a trifle selfish and a bit vain of late years.

He does not fully realize what the interesting family of children he shows with such pride to his friends has meant to their mother.

It has not occurred to him that to be the mother of three children, the youngest one year old, after six years of married life, has required a greater outlay of all the mental, moral, and physical forces than has been demanded of their father.

He is a good husband,--yet he is not the absolutely unselfish and liberal and thoughtful husband that Mrs. Gordon is wife.

If she seemed to you at all nervous, or less adaptable to your moods than he, you should stop and consider the many causes which might have led to this condition.

You are young, handsome, gifted, and unconventional, and all these things appeal to men. You can attract all the admirers you want, and more than you need, to enlarge your ideas of life, and extend your knowledge of human nature.

You say your ambition is to know the world thoroughly,--that it will aid your art.

I think that is true, if you do not pass the border-line and lose your ideals and sacrifice your principles. Once you do that, your art will lose what it can never regain.

And remember this, my dear girl, no human being ever lived or ever will live who gained anything worth having _by sacrificing the golden rule._ In your search for knowledge of the world, and acquaintance with human nature, _keep that motto ever before your soul's sight,_ "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

You say Mr. Gordon said or did nothing in that tête-à-tête luncheon his wife might not have heard or seen, but the fact that he talked entirely about you and art, and other universal subjects, and seemingly avoided any reference to his wife and children, surprised you.

And now you are wondering if you did wrong to accept this invitation. Never accept invitations of any kind from married men, unless the wife or some member of the family is included.

No matter how willing the wife may be to have you enjoy her husband's company, avoid tête-à-tête situations with benedicts.

You say you are not egotistical enough to imagine Mr. Gordon had any hidden motive for wanting to be alone with you, or for seemingly forgetting in his conversation that he was a husband and father. Yet I can see that in a measure it disillusioned you.

You do not ask a man to fling his wife and children at the head of each woman he meets, but you like him to recognize their existence.

You are a young, romantic girl seeking the ideal.

You want to find happy wives and husbands,--men and women who have sailed away from the Strands of Imagination to the more beautiful land of the Real, from whose shores they beckon you, saying: "Here is happiness and great joy. Come and join us, and feel no fear in flinging the illusions of youth behind you."

If married men only knew that is what young women are seeking,--if married women only knew that is what young men are seeking, what reconstruction would take place in the deportment of husbands and wives!

Never yet did a married woman indulge in flirtatious or sentimental converse with a bachelor without lowering herself and all women in his heart of hearts.

Never yet did a married man seem to forget his domestic ties in the presence of single women without losing a portion of their respect, however they may have been flattered by his attentions.

In every man's heart, in every woman's, is this longing to find husbands and wives who are satisfied and happy and proud, above all other things, of their loyalty.

It would be well for you to keep this fact before the minds of the men you meet. You can, in a small way, do your little toward educating on this subject the married men you encounter. And you can save yourself some embarrassing experiences.

It is no compliment to you if the husband of your friend, or a stranger, falls in love with you.

It is an easy matter for a young, attractive woman to infatuate irresponsible men.

It is a far greater compliment to you when women respect and trust you, and when you help elevate the ideals of weak men regarding your sex.

You can study the whole Encyclopedia of Manhood without breaking through the glass doors of your friend's bookcases. And you can live a free, unconventional life without sacrificing one principle, though you may ignore some customs. It is not the custom in conventional society for young women to go to theatres or dinners alone with young men. Yet I am perfectly willing you should join the large army of self-supporting, self-respecting, and well educated girls who do these things. You have been reared with that American idea of independence, and with that confidence in your ability to protect your virtue and good name, which carries the vast majority of our young women safely through all the vicissitudes of youth, and sends them chaste wives to the altar. Our American men understand this attitude of our girls, and half of them respect it, without being forced to, as the other half can be, if woman so wills.

There is no reason, to my thinking, why you should not enjoy the companionship of interesting bachelors and widowers, and take the courtesies they offer, with no chaperon but your own pride, taste, and will. So long as you know, and these men know, that you are doing nothing and going nowhere you need remember with shame or regret, the next day, just so long you are on no dangerous path.

But you must draw the line at married men, happy or unhappy. Any confidential, tête-à-tête companionship of a single woman with a married man cheapens her in the eyes of all other men and women.

It is a simpler matter to drift into free and easy manners and call them "bohemian" than to cleanse your reputation of their stain, or lift your mind from the mire to which they inevitably lead.

Once a woman begins to excuse her lawless conduct on the ground of her "artistic temperament," there are no depths to which she may not sink.

Take pride in being at once independent yet discreet; artistic, yet sensible; a student of men, yet an example of high-minded womanhood; an open foe to needless conventions, yet a staunch friend of principles; daring in methods, yet irreproachable in conduct; and however adored by men, worthy of trust by all women.

Do not take the admiration of men too seriously. Waste no vitality in a rage over their weaknesses and vices. Regard them with patience and inspire them to strive for a better goal than self-indulgence.

You can safely take it for granted that many who approach you with compliments for your charms, and pleas for your favours, would make the same advances to any other attractive girl they chanced to encounter.

Too many young women mistake a habit for a grand passion. And they forget, while they are studying man, that he is studying woman, and testing her susceptibility to flattery and her readiness to believe in his simulated infatuation.

Do not fall into the error of so many young country girls in a large city, and imagine you can establish new laws, create a new order of things, and teach men new lessons.

A great city is like an ever-burning fire,--the newcomers who thrust in their fingers will be scorched and scarred, but the fire will not be changed or extinguished.

_Keep out of the fire_.

There is no reason why you should scar yourself or smoke your garments while keeping comfortably warm.

To Mr. Charles Gordon

_Concerning the Jealousy of His Wife After Seven Years of Married Life_

I have read your letter with care. I can readily understand that you would not appeal to your wife's mother in this matter upon which you write me, as she has been the typical mother-in-law,--the woman who never gets along well with her children, and who never wants others to succeed where she fails. I recollect your telling me how she marred the wedding ceremony, by weeping and fainting, after having nagged her poor daughter during twenty years of life, and interfered with her friendships, through that peculiar jealousy which she misnamed "devoted love."

And now you are afraid that your wife is developing the same propensity, and you ask me to use my influence to cure her of it in its incipiency. You think I stand closer to Edna than any other friend.

"It is only during the last two or three years that Edna has shown this tendency," you say. "Until then she seemed to me the most sensible and liberal-minded of women, always admiring the people I liked, and even going out of her way to be courteous and cordial to a woman I praised. Of late she has seemed so different, and has often been sarcastic, or sulky, or hysterical, when I showed the common gallantries of a man fond of the society of ladies."

You think it is her inherited tendency cropping out, and that she is unconscious of it herself.

Well now permit me, my dear Mr. Gordon, to be very frank with you.

I met your wife only once before she married you.

She was a merry-hearted, healthy girl, with superb colour, and the figure of a young Venus. She was a belle, and much admired by many worth-while men.

During her honeymoon, she wrote me a most charming letter speaking of her happiness, and of her desire to make you an ideal wife.

You and Edna were my guests for a few days when your first child was a year old. She seemed more beautiful than ever, with an added spiritual charm, and you were the soul of devotion.

You are the type of man who pays a compliment as naturally as he breathes, and whose vision is a sensitive plate which retains an impression of every feminine grace. This impression is developed in the memory-room afterward, and framed in your conversation.

The ordinary mind calls such a man a flirt, or, in common parlance, "a jollier;" but I know you to be merely appreciative of womankind in general, while your heart is beautifully loyal to its ideal. You are a clean, wholesome man, who could not descend to intrigue. You are fine-looking, and you possess a gift in conversing.

Of course women are attracted to you. Edna was proud of this fact, and seemed to genuinely enjoy your popularity.

That was five years ago.

One year ago I visited your home. Edna was the mother of three children, born during the first five years of marriage.

She had sacrificed her bloom to her babies, and was pallid and anaemic. Her form had lost its exquisites curves, and she seemed years older than her age--older indeed than you, although she is four years your junior. It is a mere incident to be a father of three children. It is a lifetime experience to be their mother. She had developed nerves, and tears came as readily as laughter came of old.

She was devoted to her children, and felt a deep earnestness regarding her responsibility as a mother. But she was still the intensely loving wife, while you had sunk your rôle of lover-husband in that of adoring father.

You did not seem to think of Edna's delicate state of health, or notice her fading beauty. You regarded her as a faithful nurse for your children, and whenever you spoke of her it was as the mother, not as the sweetheart and wife.

When I mentioned the drain upon a woman's vitality to bring three robust children into life in five years, you said it was only a "natural function," and referred to the old-time families of ten and twelve children. Your grandmother had fourteen, you said, and was the picture of health at seventy-five.

My own grandmother gave ten children to the world. But we must recollect how different was the environment in those days.

Our grandmothers lived in the country, and knew none of the strain and excitement of these modern times. The high pressure of social and financial conditions, as we know them, the effort to live up to the modern standards, the congested city life and the expensive country life, all these things make motherhood a different ordeal for our women than our grandmothers. Where our grandfathers took their share of the care and guidance of children, and the children came up in a wholesome country fashion, our men to-day are so driven by the money gadfly that they can only whirl around and around and attend "to business," and all the care of the children falls upon the mother, or else upon the nurses and governesses, who in turn are a care and a worry to the wife.

You assured me Edna had all the assistants in caring for her children she wanted, but you did not realize that every paid employé in a household is, as a rule, just so much more care to the mistress, not less than a tax on the husband's purse and, consequently, on his time.

What Edna craves is _your_ love, _your_ attention, _your_ sympathy, not the service of paid domestics. She wants you to notice her fading bloom, and to take her in your arms and say, tenderly, "Little girl, we must get those old roses back. And we must go away for a new honeymoon, all alone, and forget every care, even if we forget the babies for a few days."

One little speech like that, one little outing like that, would do more toward driving away the demon of jealousy than all I could by a thousand sermons and homilies.

I remember at your own board you made me uncomfortable talking about my complexion, which you chose to say was "remarkable for a woman of my age." And then you proceeded to describe some wonderful beauty you had seen at the Country Club the day previous, and all the time I saw the tears hidden back under the lids of Edna's tired eyes, and a hurt look on her pale face. Do you imagine she was _jealous_ of your compliment to me? or of your praise of the girl's beauty at the Country Club?

No, no, my dear Mr. Gordon, I know Edna too well to accuse her of such petty feelings. She was only hurt at your lack of taste in accenting her own lost bloom by needlessly emphasizing another's possession of what had once been hers.

Yet she called upon the young lady that very day and invited her to luncheon, and even then you indulged in pronounced admiration of the guest's cheeks, gallantly requesting your wife to have the bouquet of carnation pinks removed from the table, as they were so shamed by the complexions of the ladies.

Of course it was gracefully worded in the plural, but your pallid wife could not claim her share of it, and you should have realized the fact. And the reason she could not was that she had sacrificed her health in your service, in giving your children to you, and in losing her lover.

She adores her splendid babies, but she is still a woman and a wife,--though you seem to ignore that she is anything but a mother.

Right about face, Mr. Gordon, and become the lover you were, and jealousy will be driven from your threshold.

It is your own lack of thoughtfulness, your own tactless and tasteless methods with your wife, which have caused the change in her manner. She is not jealous, she is only lonely, heart-hungry, disillusioned.

You are less noble, less considerate, less tender, less sympathetic than she believed. For the man to whom these adjectives can be applied will guard, love, and cherish the wife of his youth, and the mother of his children, before all other considerations; and he will understand how sensitive a fading wife may be, and not confound that sensitiveness with ignoble jealousy.

It is you, Charles Gordon, who must cure your wife of nerves, hysteria, and incipient jealousy, not I.

To Mrs. Clarence St. Claire

_Concerning Her Husband_

I am sorry that your matrimonial barque meets so many rough winds while hardly out of Honeymoon Bay.

Clarence and you seemed so deeply in love when I last saw you, six months after your wedding, that I had hoped all might go well with you.

I knew the disposition of Clarence to be tainted with jealousy, but hoped you would be able to eradicate it from his nature.

You know his poor mother suffered agonies from the infidelities of his father before Clarence was born. She had married a handsome foreigner with whom she was desperately enamoured, while he cared only for the fortune she brought him.

While still in the full light of the honeymoon he began to indulge in flirtations and amours, and poor Clarence, during the important prenatal period of life, received the mark of suspicion and the tendency to hypersensitiveness which then dominated the mother.

By the time Elise was born she had passed through the whole process, and was passive and indifferent.

I cannot help a sensation of amusement, even in face of the condition you describe (which is little short of tragic), as I recall the letter Clarence wrote begging me to try and prevent, by fair means or foul, his sister's marriage to old Mr. Volney.

That was two years before you and Clarence were married.

Elise, we all know, wedded for the money and position Mr. Volney gave, in return for her young beauty.

Clarence and you were ideal lovers, seeing nothing in the world outside of your own selves.

Yet Elise is quite contented, and Mr. Volney uses what little brain he has left to exult over his possession of such a beautiful young wife.

Elise upholds his dignity and flatters him into a belief that he is a great philanthropist and a social power, and in this way she has the handling of his millions, which is her idea of happiness. She travels, entertains, and poses for photographs and paintings in imported gowns, and there is no rumour of discontent or divorce.

Meanwhile, Clarence, who was so opposed to her marriage because it was loveless, is making a mess of his own love-match, through his jealousy.

You, who knew him to be insanely jealous as a lover, and who seemed to be flattered with what you thought a proof of his devotion, appeal to me now to know what to do with the husband who is destroying your love and your happiness! Surely, if Elise knew of this she might well say, "He laughs best who laughs last."

I know that you were absorbed in Clarence for the first year of your married life, and that you gave no least cause for any jealousy, and I know, as you say, that even then he was often morbid and unhappy over nothing at all.

He was jealous even of girl friends and relatives, and if you attended a matinée with one of them, he sulked the whole evening.

This was little more than he did as a lover, and you should have begun in those days to reason him out of such moods.

You imagined then it was his mad love for you which caused his unreasonable jealousy.

But jealousy is self-love, and selfishness lies at the root of such conditions of mind as his.

A woman should say to a man who sulks or goes into tantrums when she pays courteous attentions to relatives or acquaintances, "You are lowering my ideal of you--I cannot love a man who will indulge such unworthy moods. You insult my womanhood and doubt my principles by your suspicions; you intimate that I have neither truth, or judgment, or pride. You must conquer yourself, and learn to trust me and to believe in me, or I must decide I am no woman for you to take as a life companion." A man should take the same course toward a jealous sweetheart or wife.

A few quiet but firm assertions of this nature, when you were being wooed, would have given Clarence an idea that he could lose you, and that he was making himself ridiculous in your eyes. Instead, you boasted to your friends how wildly infatuated he was, and Clarence took new pride in his own blemish of character.

Now that you have to live day, and night, and week, and month, and year, with this trait, it seems a less romantic phase of devotion, I fancy. But you are not wise to grow reckless and ignore the wishes of your husband in all ways, because he is unreasonable. "Since he is so absolutely impossible to please," you say, "I may as well please myself. I have decided to take some of the liberties so many of my acquaintances do, and enjoy life outside my home if I cannot enjoy it within."

Then you proceed to tell me how more than half your associates drive, lunch, and dine with men acquaintances, and how old-fashioned they consider your scruples. And you tell me that, despite your rectitude, Clarence insults you almost daily by his unreasoning jealousy of men, women, and even children.

"I have about made up my mind to be less prudish and enjoy myself, as I am sure Clarence cannot be any more jealous than he is," you say.

Now since you have asked my advice in the matter, I can only urge you to reconsider this last determination.

So long as you are, according to law and in the eyes of the world, the wife of a man, you cannot escape comment if you are frequently seen in public places alone with another.

Were you to look into the hearts of other men who ask you to dine, drive, or lunch alone with them, you would find a feeling of increased respect when you decline, although they may show only disappointment on the surface. I know that many wives of unblemished reputation accept courtesies of this kind from masculine friends, and I of course understand that circumstances may arise which make an occasional acceptance proper.

But the fewer such occasions, the better and the safer for the married woman. The man who is perfectly willing his wife should appear frequently in public with other men does not fully appreciate the dignity of her position or his own, or else he has lost his love for her.

The fact that your husband is jealous without reason is no excuse for giving him reason. The moment men know that a husband is inclined to jealousy, he falls in their estimation, and they are seized with a desire to aggravate him, while they sympathize with the wife.

The sympathetic friend of the abused wife is a dangerous companion for her. He may mean to be platonic and kind, but almost invariably he becomes sentimental and unsafe.

Once in a thousand times the absolutely happy wife of a husband she respects as well as loves can enjoy a platonic friendship with a man who respects her, and himself, and her husband. But even that situation is liable to prove insecure, if they are much together, owing to the selfishness and weakness of human nature when the barriers of convention are removed.

But the unhappy wife must take no chances with Fate.

She must either decide to accept her lot and bear it with philosophy, or escape from it and begin life over, after the courts have given her the right to reconstruct her destiny.

You know all that entails. It is not a pleasant process.

If your love for your husband is entirely dead, and you feel that he has forfeited all right to your sympathy, pity, or patience, then break the fetters and go free. But if you feel that you are not ready for that ordeal, and that you must still remain living under the same roof with him, and continue to bear his name, then do not join the great army of wives who are to be seen in public restaurants and hotels dining tête-à-tête with "platonic friends" over emptied glasses.

You can but make trouble for yourself and add to the misery of your husband by such a course. In your particular case, I feel that your knowledge of the jealous disposition of the man you married renders it your duty to bear and forbear, and to try every method of reformation before you resort to the very common highway of divorce as an exit from your unhappiness.

A woman has no right to complain of the fault in a husband which she condoned in a lover. And a man has no right to complain of the fault in a wife he condoned in a sweetheart. Yet both may strive to correct that fault.

Insist upon having women and men friends who can be received at your home in presence of your husband. Make Clarence realize how he belittles himself in your estimation by unreasoning jealousy. Give him to understand that you want to love him and respect him, and that you have no intention of lowering your standard of behaviour, because he is constantly expecting you to. Tell him it mortifies you to find greater pleasure away from him than in his presence, yet when he insults you with his suspicions, and destroys your comfort with his moods, you can no longer think of him as your girlhood's ideal.

Ask him to try, for your sake, to use more common sense and self-control in this matter, and to help you to restore the happiness which seems flying from your wedded lives.

Do nothing to aggravate or irritate him, but do not give up your friends of either sex; this is but to increase his inclination to petty tyranny, while it will in no sense lessen his jealousy.

And when you are alone, endeavour to think of him always as sensible, reasonable, and kind.

By your mental picture you can help to cure him of the blight he received before his birth. It is the task set many a wife, to counteract the errors and neglect of mothers.

Look to the Divine source for help in your work, and remember the lovely qualities Clarence possesses when he is not under the ban of this prenatal mark.

Love him out into the light if you can--and I believe you can if you are not too soon discouraged.

It is a nobler effort to try and create in your husband the ideal you have in your mind, than to go seeking him elsewhere.

Be patient and wait awhile. Such love as you and Clarence felt in your courtship and early marriage cannot so soon have died. It is only sleeping, and suffering from a nightmare. Awaken it to life and reality and happiness.

To Young Mrs. Duncan

_Regarding Mothers-in-Law_