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Show KATHLEEN NORRIS Husband Can Cut His Throat SOMETIMES a man goes out of his way to ruin his marriage and his life. Evidently Elbert Klinger, of Spokane, Spo-kane, is such a man. He has been married for 11 months to Sally, 22 years old, who says rather pathetically, pathet-ically, "I always kept myself clean and pure in my body and in my mind, for my marriage, and I thought El did, too. But since we've been married he's shocked me and hurt me so that I'm seriously thinking think-ing of going back to my mother in Oakland, California. "Elbert is steady, generous, he is the most good-natured man I ever knew, he is popular, and considered highly 'by his firm. He is 10 years older than I am, and I have always looked up to him as my stepfather's closest friend, but his boasting about the experiences he has had with women really makes me feel sick. Dreads Nights "I have come really to dread tne nights, when he amuses himself with telling me stories about girls who have been in love with him; he says he has a letter from a high school girl of 16 that could have put him into jail if her parents had ever got hold of it. He talks of women in the oamp in California where he was a training sergeant for three years, using terms for bad houses that I never heard before, be-fore, and for the women in them, too. No matter how affectionate or how close to him I feel this mood of perienced when he married you is probable. Men don't have to turn to the unfortunates of the lowest type for favors nowadays, and if what one hears of college years is true, and I don't believe all of it by any means, purity is gather the excep-i tion than the rule. Living as I have' for 20 years in a town famous for' its co-educational college I would! discount about 80 per cent of that generalization, but there certainly is left a margin of truth. Many college col-lege affairs are those of genuine affection, af-fection, prompted by youth and, propinquity and freedom, and in1 those cases one understands, even! if 'one does not condone. The dis-i ruption that war inevitably brings, to young lives is another reason for today's comparative laxity. But any man who invents stories of tremendous conquests, who dwells fondly on their memories, and who tortures a young loving wife with disgusting details of these affairs, is really not a man, but an unreliable, vain, rather pitiful adolescent. adol-escent. Neither in manners, mind nor heart is he adult, and your one hope is that he will someday be as ashamed of himself as you are. Ask him a year from now if he would like his baby daughter to marry a man like her father. Keep up a steady barricade of prayer for his better behavior, and implement it with laughter. Meet his tales with obviously untrue un-true accounts of your own adven- his freezes me completely, and I want to go away and not ever see him again. rures witn movie siars, visiting oriental princes, New York millionaires. million-aires. Say amusedly, "If you're going go-ing to be silly, EL with aU this high-school high-school stuff, so am I!" Ask his friends innocently if they knew Elbert was such a lady-killer. Did Bill know that perfectly beautiful beauti-ful married woman, right here in town, who said she was going to kill herself for Elbert? . . stories about girls . . ." "El finds this very funny. He calls me a Puritan and says he wants me to grow up. And all the time I know that if I ever had had a serious affair with a man, which I did not, before marriage, he would be the first to be horrified; he is jealous, and he never would let me hear the end of it. In six months I will have a child, but El has spoiled what should be the happy time of waiting for my baby by hints that if it is a boy he is to be initiated into the coarser side of life while still in his teens and taught to drink and to 'handle women.' I have cried myself sick over all this, but I don't let Elbert see my tears, and my asking him please to spare me these details of his past only seem to spur him on. I must add that I know and love his mother, and that nothing he ever did or she ever told me of him previously pre-viously gave me a hint of this side of his life. Do advise me, I am so terribly unhappy I" He's Lying Well, to begin with, Sally, Elbert Is making up a lot of this. A man can't go to the age of 36, winning the respect of his mother and his friends and business associates, and at the same time entering upon heartless and dishonorable relationships rela-tionships with all sorts of women. That he wasn't completely inex- |
