it at your disposal.

* * *

All vocations require preparation and apprenticeship. Matrimony is the
only one which men and women can enter into without knowing anything
about it. Alas!

CHAPTER VII

THE START IN MATRIMONY, AND ITS DANGERS

In matrimony it is not 'All is well that ends well'; it is 'All is well
that begins well, but not too well.' Starting from this principle, I
have often advised young husbands to control themselves, and to be
careful to avoid putting all their smartest dialogue and strongest
situations in the first act of the comedy of matrimony, for fear lest
the interest should go on flagging steadily to the end.

I have advised them to see that their wives do not get their own way in
everything at once, and not to make themselves their abject slaves,
because, just as no government has ever been known to successfully
suppress, or even reduce, any liberty or privilege previously granted to
the people, just so will no husband be able to recover one inch of the
ground he has surrendered if he capitulates on the threshold of
matrimony.

In fact, let young husbands and young wives behave toward each other in
such a way that their friends will not smile and say: 'Lovely, but too
good to last, I'm afraid.'

The dangers against which I have attempted to warn men exist for
women--devoted, loving women who wish to start matrimony by trying to do
the impossible in order to please their husbands, or, if not the
impossible, at all events, what it may not be in their power to do for
ever, or even for a long time.

One of these dangers is that of economy.

'My dear,' remarked a shrewd friend to a bride of a few weeks' standing,
'you will make a terrible mistake if you let your husband think that you
can keep house on nothing.'

Young wives are sometimes pitifully anxious to be credited with
remarkable cleverness as house-mistresses. The more they love their
husbands, the less they like the idea of their toiling and moiling.
Hence they are keenly anxious to prove themselves helpmeets in the
literal sense of the word.

Not only will they name a far smaller sum as housekeeping money than
their husbands can well afford to give them, but they will actually save
out of that sum enough for their own clothes and petty cash expenses.

All this self-sacrifice is not only charming, but beautiful, when there
is necessity for rigid economy. Young couples who wisely marry on small
incomes, inst