snapping up with a pleased
licking of his chops any little word that she may throw to him. But
you let him start in to have a little fun scratching and stretching
himself, or pawing her, and it's "Charge, Carlo!" and "Bad doggie!"

Of course, no man ever believes when he marries that he's going to
wind up as kind Carlo, who droops his head so that the children can
pull his ears, and who sticks up his paw so as to make it easier for
his wife to pull his leg. But it's simpler than you think.

As long as fond fathers slave and ambitious mothers sacrifice so that
foolish daughters can hide the petticoats of poverty under a silk
dress and crowd the doings of cheap society into the space in their
heads which ought to be filled with plain, useful knowledge, a lot of
girls are going to grow up with the idea that getting married means
getting rid of care and responsibility instead of assuming it.

A fellow can't play the game with a girl of this sort, because she
can't play fair. He wants her love and a wife; she wants a provider,
not a lover, and she takes him as a husband because she can't draw his
salary any other way. But she can't return his affection, because her
love is already given to another; and when husband and wife both love
the same person, and that person is the wife, it's usually a life
sentence at hard labor for the husband. If he wakes up a little and
tries to assert himself after he's been married a year or so, she
shudders and sobs until he sees what a brute he is; or if that doesn't
work, and he still pretends to have a little spirit, she goes off into
a rage and hysterics, and that usually brings him to heel again. It's
a mighty curious thing how a woman who has the appetite and instincts
of a turkey--buzzard will often make her husband believe that she's as
high-strung and delicate as a canary-bird!

It's been my experience that both men and women can fool each other
before marriage, and that women can keep right along fooling men after
marriage, but that as soon as the average man gets married he gets
found out. After a woman has lived in the same house with a man for a
year, she knows him like a good merchant knows his stock, down to any
shelf-worn and slightly damaged morals which he may be hiding behind
fresher goods in the darkest corner of his immortal soul. But even if
she's married to a fellow who's so mean that he'd take the pennies off
a dead man's eyes (not because he needed the money, but be