That Mother-in-Law of Mine

“Be to her virtues very kind, Be to her faults a little blind.”
PHILADELPHIA: THE KEYSTONE PUBLISHING CO. 1889.
COPYRIGHT By JOHN E. POTTER AND COMPANY, 1879
Dedicated TO ALL THOSE HAVING MOTHERS-IN-LAW OR EXPECTING TO HAVE.
CONTENTS.
MY MOTHER-IN-LAW.
“Why, Charlie, you sha’n’t talk so about my mother! I won’t allow it.”
“It does sound a little rough, my dear; but I can’t help it. She does exasperate me so. She doesn’t show a proper deference for your husband, my dear. We are married now, and she ought to give up her objections to me. I can’t be expected to place myself in her leading strings.”
“But you mustn’t demand too much at once, and should try to conciliate her. Now do, for my sake; won’t you, dear?”
Here we were, only a month married, and spending our honeymoon at a most charming summer resort, where there was no excuse for getting out of patience. Everything was beautiful and attractive: Little hotel, strange to say, quite delightful; no fault to find with surroundings and accommodations; my darling Bessie, as sweet as an angel and determined to be happy and to make me happy; everything, in short, calculated to give us a long summer of delight.
That is, if Bessie had only been an orphan. But there was her mother, who had joined us on our summer trip, after the first two weeks of unalloyed happiness, and threatened to accompany us through life. Already it almost made the prospect dismal. The idea that Bessie and I would ever quarrel, or even have any impatient words together, had seemed to me to be simply ridiculous. I had seen what I had seen. My dashing friend, Fred, and his stylish wife,—they had been married two years, and a visible coldness had come upon them. I knew, by an occasional angry whisper and knitting of the brow before people, that he must sometimes swear and rave in the privacy of their own rooms, and her cutting replies or haughty indifference showed that there had been a deal of love lost between them in those two years.