much, he can still
make plans with his old friends which do not include herself.... Then is
when the foolish wife lets her husband see how hurt she is that he can
want to be with any one but herself.... Then is when the husband--used
all his life to independence, perhaps--begins to chafe under these new
bonds that hold him so fast.... No man likes to be held up at the end of
a threatened scene and made to give an account of himself.... Before
a woman has learned to cultivate a comfortable indifference to her
husband's comings and goings, she is apt to be tyrannical and exacting."

"'Comfortable indifference,' indeed!" stormed Billy to herself. "As if I
ever could be comfortably indifferent to anything Bertram did!"

She dropped the paper; but there were still other quotations from the
book there, she knew; and in a moment she was back at the table reading
them.

"No man, however fondly he loves his wife, likes to feel that she is
everlastingly peering into the recesses of his mind, and weighing his
every act to find out if he does or does not love her to-day as well as
he did yesterday at this time.... Then, when spontaneity is dead, she
is the chief mourner at its funeral.... A few couples never leave the
Garden of Eden. They grow old hand in hand. They are the ones who bear
and forbear; who have learned to adjust themselves to the intimate
relationship of living together.... A certain amount of liberty, both of
action and thought, must be allowed on each side.... The family shut in
upon itself grows so narrow that all interest in the outside world
is lost.... No two people are ever fitted to fill each other's lives
entirely. They ought not to try to do it. If they do try, the process is
belittling to each, and the result, if it is successful, is nothing less
than a tragedy; for it could not mean the highest ideals, nor the truest
devotion.... Brushing up against other interests and other personalities
is good for both husband and wife. Then to each other they bring the
best of what they have found, and each to the other continues to be new
and interesting.... The young wife, however, is apt to be jealous of
everything that turns her husband's attention for one moment away from
herself. She is jealous of his thoughts, his words, his friends, even
his business.... But the wife who has learned to be the clinging vine
when her husband wishes her to cling, and to be the sturdy oak when
clinging vines would be tiresome, h