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Show I Dorothy Dix Says ; It's unreasoning panic that causes so many widowers to j make the foolish marriages they are famous for. ;! By DOROTHY DIX, The World's HighesJ Paid Woman Writer The way of a man with a maid ha ever been held to bo one of the inscrutable in-scrutable mysteries of life, bur thorp is a stronger thing still, and that is the way widowers marry. To the innocent bystander it looks only too often as 1f a man. otherwise 6ane. took leave of his sense when rhe eame to make a second marriage. It is a common spectacle to spe a staid, fat, middle-aged widower with a house full of children, marrying a fluffy fluf-fy headed little girl no older ihan hi own daughters, or a polished society man, whose first wife belonged to his own class, taking his cook or his housekeeper for bis second wife Indeed, so little marrying sense do widowers, as a class, display that the;, have become a sort of consolation prize to women, who comfort themselves them-selves with the fact that if they can't be a No .1 wife there Is no difficulty in becoming a No 2. For they don t need any ban neither looks nor charm nor intelligence with which to angle for a widower. All they need is just to be Sally-on i he-spot, and he'll come up and flop into their nets. Nobody has ever explained the Strange psychic phenomenon of why a man will marrj for hi second wife a woman he wouldn't have looked at for his first, nor why a sensible, practical intelligent man. with forty-five or fifty years of experience in life should, in venturing into the holy estate a second sec-ond time, throw all prudence and cau- Hon to the winds and contract an al-gj1 al-gj1 " " , 1 inner i hut seemingly any idiot would wrep know was inevitably bound to end in disaster Yet we have all seen widower who: were men of culture and refinement marrying coarse and illiterate women with whom they had not one thought or idea In common. And we have seen; 'he misery that resulted. And we've seen widowers bring sill. undisciplin-1 ed. unwise young step-mothers to rulel over turbulent children who were nearer her age than she was to her husband's, and we've looked on in pity at the fight that followed And we've wondered what made: those widowers marry as they did We hav e wondered how a man whose girls I were the genth bred daughters of a lady could put over them to rear them a woman who had none of the qualities quali-ties of their own mother, a woman who could teach them none of the elegancies ele-gancies and graces that their own mother would have taught them; a woman who was incapable of making or holding for them the place in society so-ciety that their own mother would 9 nave done. And we have wondered how any man could have been deluded enough to even hope that any young girl would have the lact, the sen-control, the far-reaching far-reaching Intelligence to enable her to fill the most difficult of all roles, that of step-mother We have wondered how any man could have been so blind as not to foresee that bringing such a one into his house was like bringing in a firebrand, and that the result: would ine iiably be a home that was always in a row and a turmoil, and that the end was bound to be that his, children would be alienated from him. and driven from him, and his own heart torn in two between his love and duty to the two factions We hae wondered at these things and now an archbishop of the middle weat has explained them. He says that the widowers who make these unsult able marriages for the most part are I men who have become panic-stricken I upon the deaths of their wives, and who remarry as oon a possible mere ! Ij that their children may b cared for. Furthermore, marrying in baste jthey marr. without judgment t h first i woman that is handy In his long experience In dealing 'with foolish and weak humanity, the 'archbishop has seen thousands oi these marriages that have turned out so unhappily that he is now establi-h I ing a home where motherless boys raav be taken care of, and their fa Ithers thus prevented from being driv-j driv-j en into precipitate marriages and undesirable un-desirable marriages. J marriages. No doubt the archbishop is right A I woman whose husband dies leaving her With a house full of little children ha-always ha-always been a tcar-compelling object ; of sympathy, but in reality she is no! I half so pafuetic or so forlorn ahd ltelp-I ltelp-I less as ihe man whose wife dies, leav-I leav-I Ing him 'with a lot of children to care ! for. If the "woman has money she suffer- nothing, but her bereavement She can keep her children together. She has no anxiety about their upbringing about their being kepi clean physical- ly and spiritually. She has the consolation con-solation of her comfortable, weir ordered or-dered home She does not need to marry again in order lo have somebody to look after her children. But the widower with children is in a desperate plight unless he happens to have a mother or sister who can step into the breach. He does not know what to do for children when they are sick or when they are well He doesn't even know what clothes they ought to have. He must be at his business all day and cannot watcb them He knows they are running the streets learning the things they should not know. He can only turn them over to hirelings, and there is no wonder that he grows desperate and thinks that any woman to take a mothers moth-ers place over his brood is better than no one And if he marries a woman inferior to his first wife, ihat is no wonder either, because the job of step mother is not an alluring one. nor one that appeals to a woman attractive enough to be desirable to olher men I know a cultivated and attractive young widower with three little girls, who declared that a widower with children chil-dren is a pariah that no woman of his own class will look at It takes a' woman with the spirit of a martyr to want to undertake a readv-made family. fam-ily. And there you are. That explains why widowers marry foolishly They marry because they have gotten into a panic, but that does not help their case. Jumping out of the frying pan into the fire has neer been a successful! remedy for any trouble So let us' hope that in every community the I archbishop's plan for establishing a home for motherless boys will be fol- lowed, so that widowers will not be driven by a desperate situation into hasty and disastrous marriages. For it is eternally true that those I who marry in haste repent at leisure ! (Copyright, 1917, by the Wheeler Syndicate, Syn-dicate, Inc.) Dorothy Dlx articles appear regular ly in this paper every Monday, Wed-nesdav Wed-nesdav and Fridav |