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Show 8 ' Dorothy Dix Says j The First Desire of Every Wife's Heart Is to Be Treated as If She Were a Bride Who Never Took Off Her Wedding Veil. j ulJ Paid Woman riter vl 2r Statistics show that about one mar- if' riage in twelve ends in divorce. Also that three-fourths of all divorces are granted to women. This would appear ap-pear to indicate that men have not yet acquired the gentle art of giving satisfaction satis-faction as husbands. The reason .that women rush oftener than men to the divorce courts to have their matrimonial fetters severed is not uecuu&u mau. ib tuu 11 more or less imperfectly domesticated animal, and given generally to straying from the straight and narrow path. Of course, j when women ask for divorces the law requires them to allege some grave misdemeanor of which their husbands havo been guilty, but in reality it is not usually a man's morals, but his manners, that his wife finds unendurable. unen-durable. The commonest observation shows that as long as a man is charming and agreeable to live with, his wife is as blind as a bat to his vices, and willing will-ing to forgive any amount of side stepping. step-ping. It is only when he is cross and 9 surly and grouchy around home that I she" puts private detectives on his track and smells his breath to see If he has been drinking. No, it is not for their vices that so JS. manv women divorce their husbands. it is'just as often for their virtues. It is because men do not know how to treat their wives that marriage so frequently fre-quently becomes cinders, ashes and dust in the mouth of a woman instead of being one long, sweet song. In saying that men do not know how to treat their wives, I mean no reflection re-flection on the treatment itself. A few men treat their wives brutally, but lliCJ' rtlC VCIJ icn. J- "V t,"c uiujui ity of American men treat their wives better than, they deserve, but they do not treat the wives in the way that the wives would like to be treated. This is not the man's fault. Even a husband is a mere man, with a simple sim-ple mind that works along straight lines, whereas the mind of a woman is the most complicated piece of machinery ma-chinery in the world and performs curves and loops and death-defying spirals whenever it gets into action. Wherefore, a man never guesses that marriage is so often a disappointment to woman because he doesn't treat her in terms of direct contradiction. I Now, generally speaking, every wife desires to be treated: (a) As a perpetual bride, yet the - mother of a family. fL. (b) As a doll baby, yet a seeress. t' (c) As a cave woman, yet a suffra gette. It isn't much wonder that few men are equal to leaping these feminine hurdles, or that they even ever perceive per-ceive that they have been erected by their wives along the domestic pathway. path-way. But because they balk at them, or knock them down in their blundering blunder-ing blindness is why women beat on their breasts and cry out that marriage mar-riage is n failure, and change partners so oiten. To begin with, no man ever understands under-stands the miracle of feminine sentiment senti-ment that enables a woman to stay a bride at heart through all the forty or fifty years of variegated matrimonial matrimon-ial tribulations that are the usual human hu-man lot. He gets over being a bridegroom bride-groom at the altar, and packs away his romance with his wedding waistcoat waist-coat with a sigh of thankfulness that he doesn't have to bother to put it on any more. II was always a misfit, , anyway. 1 His idea of being a good husband is to treat his wife kindly and affection-' affection-' ately to bestow on her a nice sincere ' ham and egg kiss on the morning and ftu a cocktaily one in the evening as he f goes and returns from his work, and, 1 for the balance, to get busy making I money so that he may give her every possible comfort and luxury. When he thinks of himself, he hands himself a bouquet as a husband. He's as domestic as a house cat, as temperate temper-ate as the town pump, as Industrious as any dray horse, and his wife is as well dressed as any woman in their set. What more could a woman want? But the wife isn't satisfied. Heav- ?rn08on2! KS1e doesn,t think she is well treated by her husband. She thinks ;Xa-P00r' mlserable, neglected Z h0 ,,a stan'Qd for affection, and who has lost her husband's love. Of course, she wants all of the material ma-terial comforts that her husband gives femlmV8 ne f thQ niarve,s of th0 iSS, ? mPerament that it can be both utterly sentimental and utterly notVt th? 8amC time- Shc does her house, or a cylinder in an automo- m i,,lawlh,er off o her French millinery but she wants her husband 1 !10 l, mak0 love with one hand and make money with the other. w inch is as if one should demand an nstrument that would be a cash register reg-ister by day and a violin by nighL But whether there is anv money or not, the wife's inexorable demand is for sentiment. She can never take love for granted. She can never realize re-alize that the love that takes itself out in writing sonnets to a ladv's eve-brows eve-brows is a poor, cheap thing compared to the devotion that toils night and day that she may sit at ease, that Stands With its nwn ho l,n.i u tween her and the storms of life. She hungers and thirsts for the words of love. She wants to be told that her grizzled hair is more beautiful than it was when it was gold or jet. She wants to be told that fat is more becoming to her than was the lithness of youth. She wants to be told that at 50 she is still a dangerous siren, and that her husband Is still marveling marvel-ing at his luck in getting her for a wife. She yearns for letters, telegrams, flowers, candy, when she is a grandmother grand-mother with the same avid yearning she had when she was a debutante. Now the average middle-aged man loves his middle-aged wife with a far greater love than he did his bride. But he does not love her because she looks young and beautiful to him. He sees her absolutely as she is, with all her avoirdupois upon her. What he loves her for is for something some-thing that goes far and away beyond any living picture. He loves her for the years they have lived together, for her unfaltering devotion; for the struggles they have made and the fights they have fought out together; for the little beds they have watched over together, and the tiny graves they have knelt beside with broken hearts. There is the love of man for woman in nis affection, the love of the man for the comrade he has marched shoulder to shoulder with, the reverent rev-erent love of a man for all that is spiritual, spir-itual, and pure, and high, and holy. And because his love is so much a part of his life it never even occurs to the averago man to pay his wife the silly, little lying compliments that ho would pass over as the small change of conversation to any chance woman acquaintance. And he never even dreams that his sensible wife, the wife on whose clear judgment he has relied many and many a time for important im-portant business decisions, the strong, capable wife who has been his helpmeet help-meet and borne without flinching her half of the burdens of their married life, has In her a little, weak, silly, childish streak that pines for flattery and for love talk just as much when she Is sixty as when she was sixteen. The first desire of a wife's heart is to be treated as if she were a bride who never took off her wedding veil and orange blossoms. Her second desire de-sire is to bo treated as but we'll talk , of that in the next article. |