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Show I' THE ROUGH DIAMOND. I : By DOEOTHY DIX, The Worlds Highest Paid Woman Write: : ill la, Here is a queer case in which my PpB advice has been asked. A young man Is in love with a pretty I girl who has many admirable qualities I of character, but execrable manners, t She sprawls in uncouth attitudes as I Ehe sits. She eats like a savage. She I does not even understand the proper I use of a handkerchief, and she lacks I all the refinements and daintiness that I one thinks of as being instinctive with : ivomen. I In spite of all this the young man f Is still fascinated with the girl, and he wants to know If there is any way in which she may be taught the con- m ventional usages of good society and 1 to conduct herself in a refined man- B Of course there is. The one remedy m for a case like this is for the girl to be B' taken away from her family and sent W to some good school where they make I a specialty of polishing up rough dia- monds. Or, If the girl is too old to I go to school the same end could be I attained by putting her in the care l of some gentlewoman who would teach I her the bearing and manners of a lady. F All of this would be a process ex- ever, and It could only be successful r. if the girl realized her deficiencies and & was eager and anxious to correct them. There have been Innumerable instances instanc-es of girls whose early lives had been spent m the backwoods, or among the rude anr uncultured people ,who have gone into finishing schools boors and come out of them the glass of fashion and the mould of form. But these were girls who were willing will-ing to sacrifice their vanity on the altar al-tar of their progress, who begged to have their faults pointed out in order to correct them, and who subordinated subordinat-ed their conceit of themselves to their ambitions. Women are imitative by nature. It does not take them long to change from being chambermaids to countesses, countess-es, or to pick up an accent, or the latest lat-est way of doing things. This makes it possible for Cinderella to be her own fairy godmother and change herself from the kitchen drudge to the belle cf the ball in the twinkling of an eye if she makes up her mind to perform this miracle. But the important thing is that she desires to change and become be-come the princess. Certainly it does not indicate that a girl has much power of observation or much ambition if she has permitted V herself to grow up with clownish man- ners in the midst of a modern city where she is presented with continual object lessons of the way in which people peo-ple of Intelligence and refinement dress and conduct themselves. But why, in a world of pearls of girls, should a young man pick out this rouch diamond for a. wife? Of one I thing he may be sure and that Is that if her manners grate on his sensibility before he is married to hex, they will be intolerable when he has to contemplate contem-plate them every day. It Is the little peculiarities of those 1 with whom we live that get upon our nerves, so that the way that someone always clears his throat before speaking, speak-ing, or the noise that another makes r.s she drinks her coffee, or Uie eternal etern-al creak of another's shoes, or the perpetual per-petual sniffing of another becomes harder to forgive than would the commission com-mission of some actual crime. If she committed half the sins on the calendar she would not be so loatlf-soine loatlf-soine to a scrupulously tubbed and 'f2& scrubbed, neat man as Is a dirty and CjZP" solvenly wife, nor are a man's spotted SjjLf morals any more repulsivo to a dainty woman than a man who dribbles soup and gravy over his clothes as he eats. Therefore, it is well for both men and women to save themselves as much domestic disillusionment as possible pos-sible by at least picking out as life companions those who have been trained train-ed in the amenities of civilization. Thus do they preserve themselves from having their sensibilities unduly lacerated lacer-ated and from precipitating a state of civil warfare on their firesides. For experience shows that the one thing that neither husband nor wife takes kindly from the other is criticism criti-cism of personal peculiarities. This is easily comprehended, for both husband hus-band and wife like to think that each is an ideal to the other, that each! exists surrounded by an aura of ro-l mantic perfectness to the other, and this fond delusion is shattered Into smithereens the minute husband begins be-gins to tell wife that she does not know , how to use her fork properly, and that real ladles, such as he has been accustomed to, don't perform certain rights of their toilet in public, or when wife corrects husband's grammar, gram-mar, or tells him that gentlemen don't fin thus nnrl so Moreover, those who marry the rough diamond husbands of wives with a iew to polishing them up run another an-other risk that is extremely dangerous. And that is the danger to their pride. Love can stand a great many things, but it is very seldom strong enough to survive being ashamed of its object, and there is little domestic happiness in those homes where the man blushes for his wife, or the woman for her husband. hus-band. And, curiously enough, people are more often ashamed of silly little things than they are of big ones. A man is more mortified by his wife being be-ing ill dressed, and awkward of manner, man-ner, and rough of speech of her not knowing how to hold her own socially than he would be if 6he had some serious se-rious defect of character. A woman blushes more for.hor husband looking and acting like a boor than she would if he had committed a crime. She would almost as soon he would murder a man as to murder the king's English. Eng-lish. On the other hand, pride is the hand : maiden of affection. The man who is; proud of his wife, who likes to show her off, who finds his chief pleasure in making a show window of her in , which to exhibit his prosperity, is ever, the adoring husband. And the woman who lives in her bus-1 band's career, who thinks him the wis- est, cleverest, handsomest man on earth, and who like3 to flaunt him in the faces of her friends is the wife who has found marriage a success. A man and a woman may be selfish, they may ruthlessly sacrifice Ui03e who are married to them, they may work their husband or wife to death to grati- iy tnem, out as long as uiey can nc objects of pride to their mates they glory in their sorvltude. It is a sort of sublime unselfish vanity, van-ity, the sort of vanity that parents have in their children the thing that makes us want to be npar. the rose if we cannot be the rose, and to rejoice that the rose is ours. , After all, vanity is one of the consolation consol-ation prizes of life that nover failB, and in picking out a husbnnd or wife I would advise every man and woman to' select a life partner of whom they could at least be proud. |