putation, they should look at him when
he's out for a day's gaiety. No wonder that men, when they "go to the
dogs," go to Paris. "The dogs" at home are too much like a moral purge
to make a long stay in the "kennel" anything but a most determined effort
of the will. We possess, as a nation, so strangely the joie de mourir
without much knowledge of the joie de vivre.

_A School for Wives_

All marriage is a lottery--that is why the modern tendency is to examine
both sides of the hedge before you ask someone to jump over it with you.
A single man may be said to have his own career in his own hands; but
once married, he runs the risk of having to begin all over again, and
recommence with a load on his back. A good wife can make a man, but a
bad wife can undo a saint. And how's he to know if she be a good wife or
a bad 'un _until she's his wife_, which is just too late, as the corpse
said to the tax collector. You see, a man has nothing to go on, except
to look at what might be his mother-in-law. A girl is far more
fortunate. If a man can afford to keep a wife, he's already passed the
examination as a "highly recommended." He, at any rate, has to take
marriage seriously. No man wants to put his hard-earned savings into a
purse with a hole at the bottom, nor live with a woman who begins to
"nag" the moment she ceases to snore. If only women were brought up with
the idea that marriage is a very serious business, and not merely the
chance to cock-a-snook at Mamma, marriage would be far less often a
failure. But most girls are brought up to regard the serious business of
matrimony from the problematical point of view of whether her husband
will earn enough money to give her a "good time." If it be a "serious
business," as Mamma and Papa and the parish priest assert it to be, then
let her begin as she would begin a business, by starting to learn it. I
don't see why there shouldn't be a School for Wives, and no girl be
allowed to marry until she has at least passed the fourth standard.
After all, it is only fair on the man that he should know that with the
sweetest-dearest-loveliest-little-darlikins-in-the-whole-world he is also
getting a woman who knows how to boil an egg, and make an old mutton bone
and a few potatoes go metaphorical _miles_. The knowledge would be a
great comfort to him when his little "darlikins'" feet-of-clay began to
show through her silk stockings. As it is, marriage to him is little