ng lost sight of,
whom I had last seen as a newly-wedded wife, loving and beloved. She was
now very much changed, hard and haggard of face. I asked after the man I
remembered as a radiant bridegroom.

'Oh, he's gone the way of all husbands,' she said, with a sigh; 'liver,
my dear.'

'Do you mean he's dead?' I asked, shocked and pained.

'Oh, dear, no, he's alive enough, but he's developed liver and that's
killed our love,' was the cynical reply.

It had. Devotion and dyspepsia are hard to reconcile and my friend's
husband had developed a nasty knack of throwing his dinner in the fire
whenever it displeased him, a habit hardly conducive to home happiness.

Food, as a fact, is one of the chief sources of friction in married
life. It sounds farcical, but I am perfectly serious. Food, the ordering
and cooking of it and the subsequent paying for it, is one of the great
tragedies of a wife's existence. Time, the great healer, mercifully
deadens the intensity of this anguish, and matrons of fifty or so can
face the daily burden of food-ordering with something like indifference.
But to a woman who has not yet reached the fatal landmark aptly
described as 'the same age as everybody else, namely, thirty-five,' it
is the greatest cross, whilst many a bride has had her early married
life totally ruined by the horrid and ever recurring necessity of
finding food for her partner. Men make fun of women because their
dinner, when alone, so often consists of an egg for tea, but women have
such a constitutional hatred of food-ordering, inherited, no doubt, from
a long line of suffering female ancestry, that the majority of them
would gladly live on tea and bread-and-butter for the rest of their
lives sooner than face the necessity of daily meditating on a menu. For
this reason I believe vegetarian husbands are particularly desirable,
since the whole principle of food-reform is simplicity. Those who go in
for it acquire an entirely fresh set of ideas on the importance of food,
and become quite pathetically easily pleased. I know a woman whose
husband is a vegetarian and she declared that the food question, so
disturbing a factor in most homes, had never caused her a single tear,
or frown, or angry word, or added wrinkle. She assured me that her
husband would cheerfully breakfast off a banana, lunch off a lettuce,
dine on a date and sup on a salted almond. When the house was upset on
the occasion of a large evening party and there were