out a list of directions to his wife
as to how she should manage things during his absence.

"Better have the children carry umbrellas this morning; it's going to
rain," said he, as he went out of the door. "Be sure to put on their
rubbers. And since the baby is so croupy I'd get out his winter
flannels, if I were you."

"Yes, dear," said the patient wife. "Make your mind easy. I'll take
just as good care of them as if they were my own children." Of course
this is an extreme case.

There are other fathers whose whole idea of the parental relation
seems to be indulgence. No system of discipline, however mild, can be
carried out when such a man wins the children's hearts and ruins their
dispositions. It is he, isn't it? (I don't quite recollect the tale)
who was sent, after death, to the warm regions, there to expiate his
many sins of omission. And his adoring children, who had been hauled
to heaven by the main strength, let us say, of their mother, found
that the only thing they could do for him was to call out celestial
hose company number one and ask them to play awhile upon the
overheated apartments of poor tired papa.

The truth is--sit close and let no man hear what we say!--that these
fathers are much what we, the mothers, make them. If, under the
mistaken idea of saving father from all the worries of the children,
we hurry the youngsters off to bed before he comes home in
the evening, conceal our heart-burnings over them, do our
correspondence-school work in secret and solitude, meditate in the
same fashion over plans for their upbringing, talk to our neighbors
but never to him about the daily troubles, how can we expect any man
on earth, no matter how susceptible of later angelic growth, to become
a wise and devoted father? Tired or not, he is a father, not a mere
bread-winner. Whether he likes it at the moment or not, it is for
his soul's health for him to enter into the full life of his family,
including those problems which are at the very heart of it, after his
day of grinding, and very likely unloving, work at the office. Here
love enters to interpret, to soften, to make all principles live. Here
alone he can give himself to those gentler forms of judgment which
are necessary as much to the completion of his own character as to the
happiness and welfare of his wife and children. Someone has said that
we wrong our friends when we ask nothing of them; and certainly it is
true that we wrong our husbands wh