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Show KATHLEEN NORRIS The Little Fox in Your House right at the table. But then when she slowly and comfortably goes at her nails, somehow it makes me sick. Jean and I share law offices together, and she is a great pal, but all this nail-cleaning and after-lunch after-lunch tooth-picking in public kind of goes against me." Ruins Bis Jokes Another husband represents a large class of the domestically ill-treated. ill-treated. He appears to be a real man's man, president of more than one club and a general favorite. He says his devoted, loved little Lucy spoils all social occasions by hurriedly putting in the point of his jokes before he reaches them. "Lucy has no more sense of humor than our seven-months-old son," he writes. "When I get started and everyone begins to laugh, she puts in these little unamused comments, com-ments, or reminds me that it happened hap-pened on a Saturday and not a Tuesday, or she corrects my grammar. gram-mar. What the dickens can a man do when he begins to talk, and his wife says 'that is funny, Dan, but I've heard it so often,' or 'make this one short, dear, other people like to talk'? And it isn't," the aggrieved ag-grieved Dan finishes, "as if she contributed anything. Getting anything any-thing out of my wife is like getting the cork out of a bottle when its way down in." "TVfY WIFE GETS A COLD, and the tip of her nose gets red, and it's that way all winter," a man wrote me, some years ago. "She never cures it up, and you'd think she was rather proud of it if you could hear her say, "here's my cold again.' Now our little Sheila is four, and Gwen is beginning on her. 'I believe she's going to have my colds every winter,' she tells people. Doesn't it ever go through her head that ' a man hates that sort of thing?" "Lottie talks poor," another husband hus-band also wrote me some time ago. I have saved a dozen of thAe letters let-ters from men, all about those apparent ap-parent trifles that really do have an important effect on married happiness. hap-piness. "Lottie talks poor," writes Fred Green. "We aren't poor, not by any standards that would hold anywhere else in the world. We own our home and most of our car and a third of our television set, and we have all the rest of it, refrigerator and radio and telephone and gas stove. Of course, we haven't as much money as we'd like, who has? But that eternal cheerful 'well, we're poor folks, and fur coats and trips tp Florida aren't for us. Don't talk as if you were as rich as the Smiths, Fred, because you know we can't afford things.' "You get darned tired of itl" this letter ends gloomily. A third letter is from a man who married a pretty wile. Shabby at Home "Beauty is Fern's business," Kane Choate writes. "She never lets up. The only people who see my wife looking pretty now are outsiders. outsid-ers. At home she's always plastered and oiled and has her hair done up in little snails, dripping on her wrapper. She always wears shabby washable things around the house because lipstick and paint and nail polish get on them. She shoves . . don't wrinkle me . . one side of her face up at me to kiss when I get home and says, 'don't wrinkle me.' "When we go out she looks swell, and I'm proud of her. But a man likes a pretty, neat, comfortable-looking comfortable-looking woman in his home, too." Seven other letters, among those I have been collecting over the years, complain of untidiness and sloppiness at the breakfast table, on the part of busy vives and mothers, but for these criticisms I have less sympathy, for only a woman knows what that pre-office, pre-school scramble can be. Then there's the husband whose wife cleans her fingernails in public pub-lic places; when they are lunching together downtown, for Instance. This is most irritating and embarrassing embar-rassing for all present. "I've gotten used, and I guess most fellows have," says this letter, "to her taking out her compact and doing up her face and her lips |