“Beauty Rules.”
“Rule One.—A woman’s power in the world is measured by her power to please. Whatever she will wish to accomplish, she will manage it best by pleasing. A woman’s grand social aim should be to please.
“Rule Two.—Modesty is the ground on which all a woman’s charms appear to the best advantage. In manner, dress, conversation, remember always that modesty must not be forgotten.... Not prudery. Modesty is of the soul. Prudery is on the surface.
“Rule Three.—So the woman’s aim is to please, and modesty is the first principle.
“Rule Four.—Always dress up to your age or a little beyond it. Let your face be the youngest thing about you, not the oldest.
“Rule Five.—Remember that what women admire in themselves is seldom what men admire in them.
“Rule Six.—Women’s beauties are seldom men’s beauties.
“Rule Seven.—Gayety tempered by seriousness is the happiest manner in society.
“Rule Eight.—Always speak low.
“Rule Nine.—A plain woman can never be pretty. She can always be fascinating if she takes pains. I remember well a man who was a great admirer of our sex telling me that one of the most fascinating women he ever knew was not only not pretty, but as to her face decidedly plain. ‘Her figure,’ he said, ‘was neat, her dressing faultless, her every movement graceful; her conversation was clever and animated, and she always tried to please. She was one of the most acceptable women in society I ever knew. She married brilliantly.
“Rule Ten.—Every year a woman lives, the more pains she must take with her dress.
“Rule Eleven.—In all things, let a woman ask what will please a man of sense before she asks what will please the men of fashion. You see, if a woman lives for the commendation of men of fashion, she will, if pretty, piquant, or what not, have a reign of ten years. But if she remembers that she has charms of mind and character and taste, as well as charms of figure and complexion, the men of sense will follow her for a half century; and in the long run the men of fashion will be led by the men of sense.
“I have often asked myself, ‘What is the secret of her character?’ and I have always come to the same conclusion: that if her religious faith were deducted from her, she would not be what she is, but must become a less agreeable and not so good a woman.”
CHAPTER IX.
THE LOVED WIFE.
Our life-story does not end, as it does in the novel, when the wedding-bells ring. After that comes the real life. The wedding-bells are but the call to more faithful duties, more earnest, unselfish love, greater effort to be attractive, more pains to make the husband happy than were taken to win his love. They ring out the birth of a love that is until death. They ring out the knell of all coyness and romance. The hero becomes the very human man: the shy girl is a woman who is to be his helpmeet. They ring out the beginning of a battle where man and woman must stand shoulder to shoulder if they would win. They tell of a conflict where there will be strength in union, but in division weakness, destruction of happiness, complete failure, disgrace, and sometimes even death.
A girl rarely considers the deep responsibilities she takes upon herself when she marries. She is more often thinking of the happiness it will give her than of what she is to be to the man. She does not stop to think whether or not she is going to make her husband happy. She forgets that from that time his whole happiness, his success in life, almost his soul, are in her keeping. “A man must ask his wife’s leave to thrive” is altogether true. A wife may be a dead weight or an inspiration. The dead weight drags even the strongest down, and an inspiration helps him to conquer every time. I have heard a man with a bad wife say: “Oh, I have no heart in me to do anything. She takes it all out of me.” I have known a man with less ability, but with a true wife to inspire him, to conquer where the other failed.
Marriage itself is not happiness unalloyed. Life never is in any state. You are happier married than single, but marriage has its hard places. The romance soon dies out. Real life comes. The every day living together brings friction. It is for better and for worse. It seems a light thing to say at the time when you are sure it will all be for the better. You fancy you have only half learned his goodness. In many cases that is so. In many more it is not: it is for the worse. Then the break comes. Gradually his weaknesses will be revealed to you. The golden idol shows clay feet. Slowly the gilding is all rubbed off, and the idol is seen to be clay all through. Many a woman meets with this disappointment. It is the great disappointment of her life. God help the woman who finds that her husband is unworthy of her love! A weak woman sinks under the blow, and drags him even farther down. A strong woman will stand up bravely and in the end draw him up to her heights.
She must gather together all her love for him. She must allow religion to take the helm with this love or all is lost. Sometimes love reels: sometimes the senses do. Then, of all times, a woman must watch herself well. She is fighting a terrible battle with her disappointment as well as with his faults. They must be silent battles: the more silent the stronger they will be, and the more sure she will be of victory. She must never by hint or word let any one outside know of his failings. If they are of the kind which go before or which are well known by the community, she must show the world that she is blind to them. She must never speak against her husband even to her own mother. She must never admit that he has a fault. She has entered into a partnership where one partner cannot be untrue to the other. She has promised before God to honor him. Her loyalty may save him. It is certain that if she does talk about him, and it comes to his ears, it will drive him away from her. When a breach is made between husband and wife, it widens continually. What in the beginning is a tiny thread soon becomes a broad gulf. It is really wonderful what a little while it takes for this breach to widen, and how disastrous are the effects. Our daily papers are a continual illustration of that fact.
A perfect wife will never allow her opinion of her unworthy husband to be known. If he is unkind to her, she hides it as she hides her own misdeeds. Indeed, she would rather take upon herself the blame for any trouble others may have seen. She is pleased always with any kind attention he receives. A lady wrote her sister, with whom her husband was stopping for a few days: “He writes me you are doing every thing to make his visit pleasant. Thank you. Whatever kindness you bestow upon him you bestow upon me.”
You will find plenty of listeners when you tell of your husband’s faults and your own wrongs. They will be your apparent sympathizers. Not one, however, will respect you for doing so. No one will care about you. Almost all will repeat it to some one else. It will be generally said that you live unhappily with your husband. You will have as much blame as he has. It is the way of the world. It knows pretty well that the wife who so far forgets herself as to talk against her husband is as much to blame for the trouble as he is. She cannot be a good, loving, Christian wife, who is trying to lead him to better things. Such a woman would hold her tongue. In telling, you have simply opened all the doors and windows of your house and invited the community to look their fill at your most private affairs. The rest of the doors and windows of the community are closed. You have noticed—have you not?—that your confidence has not been returned. No, indeed. It is well known that the woman who cannot guard her husband’s honor cannot respect another’s confidence. If only in the sight of men then, the untrue wife is the loser. She sends him into greater wrong. She undoes herself as she undoes him. Together they must rise or fall. Many a woman in her blind anger at her husband has tried to crush him. Like Samson, when he would crush the Philistines, she has succeeded, but only to bury herself in the ruins with him.
That her husband is not what she thought him, is no excuse: she took him for worse as well as better. She is simply showing that she is not one whit above him, and that he has been decidedly deceived in her. He has gotten the worse too.
Unfortunately true, good men have bad wives, too—they are not confined to bad husbands only. There are wives of good men who forget that the husband’s whole happiness depends upon them. Many a wife forgets this great responsibility. His business may be successful and everything outside going along satisfactorily, but if he has no peace at home he has no happiness. A woman who does not make her husband happy fails in her great life-work. She is unworthy to be the mother of his children. God gave woman to man to be his helpmeet; she is no helpmeet if she makes his life wretched. It is her highest pleasure, her great “rights,” to smooth his path. If she fail there, she far better never have married.
What a man wants in his wife is companionship, sympathy, and love. He wants to feel that she is his best friend. He never wants to look anywhere else for sympathy and help: he never will if he can get all he needs from her. His life has many hard places: he needs a companion to go over them with him. He is often overtaken by misfortunes: he needs some one to stand by him and sympathize as she helps him to bear them. He has to fight with poverty often, and he needs a woman whom he feels, when he puts his arms about her, is worth fighting for. He has many enemies: he needs a wife whose loving words will make up for the bitter ones he hears from them. He needs a wife who will make him forget, when he is in her presence, that there is an unkind world outside. He meets sin everywhere: he wants a wife who will give him words of counsel, and who will take his hands and lead him to greater faith in, and love for, the Father. Storms will come all through life, he must encounter them. He needs a woman who will cling to him through the hardest. He needs her love through sunshine and victory as well.
He wants to feel through all that his refuge is in her arms as hers is in his. He wants a wife upon whose breast he can lay his head, when sorrows come, and weep. He wants one who will make him feel that no matter where else death strikes, as long as he has her he can endure life. I remember a man who, when his dearly-beloved sister died, laid his head on his wife’s shoulder, weeping, and said, “If it were you I should die.”
There are in history women upon whose strong hearts strong men have leaned and have become more strengthened in that leaning. Weak men have become manly through a womanly wife. Strong men have been weakened by a weak, wicked wife. Truly a man is made or marred when he marries. He must indeed ask his wife leave to thrive.
It is in every woman’s power to be a well-loved wife. She cannot exact it: she must win it. She has his affection to start upon. She must increase it, instead of allowing it to decrease. She must not go upon the principle that because she is his wife it is his duty to worship her. If she does, she will be bankrupt as far as his affection is concerned. Men are not made in that way, as I have said before, and you must take them as you find them if you take one at all. Many a wife has allowed her husband’s affection to die. She has fancied, maybe, that she was lowering her dignity to try to keep what she considered was her due. Nothing is our due of which we are not worthy. We are not worthy of a love we do not try to keep. Women who are exacting after marriage are generally the ones who tried the hardest to attract the man at first. It is generally the girl who runs after a man till she gets him who makes no effort after marriage to retain his love, and who talks the loudest about her “rights, and not grovelling at his feet,” if it is suggested that she do better.
Before she married she dressed for him. Nothing she owned was too pretty to put on when she knew he would see her. She was careful to be tidy in her person. She would never let him see a room in her home which was in disorder. She was courteous always. She never said an impatient word to him or before him. If he was cross, she bore it like an angel. She greeted him always when he came with a sweet smile and caress. She had loving words for him as she told him how she wanted to see him every minute since they had parted. She desired in every way to appear at her best before him. She hid every defect of temper or disposition.
After marriage she does not care how untidy she is when he comes home. She never thinks of dressing for him. She is not courteous to him. She has no loving word, and she never hesitates to speak a cross one to him. She has smiles yet for the outside world, but none for the man whom she has promised to love and honor. She talks to him as she would be ashamed to have any one hear her speak. She never bears with him. If he is cross, she is crosser. Is it any wonder she loses his love? She is not what he thought she was, or what he thought he was marrying. If he had seen her in her true colors before the fatal words were spoken, he never would have bound himself to her. The beautiful soul, the sweet smile that won him, are gone. The gentle spirit he fancied he detected, was a delusion. What he loved, he does not possess. He possesses an unwomanly wife, and that he did not woo. With a weak man there comes a break. He often seeks his happiness with another woman. A strong man endures in silence, growing old and sad, broken in his youth.
Ought this to be? There is no reason, because you have grown familiar to each other, you should not try to hide your temper as you did before. There is no reason, because he is “caught” and cannot get away from you, that you should cease to be attractive to him. You spread your net well. Now make the nest so attractive that he will be glad that he was “caught.” Be all that you led him to fancy you were.
Why should not a woman dress for her husband? Why should she not cultivate a sweet disposition for him and endeavor to make his home the happiest spot on earth? Why not try to banish from it every cloud, everything that will annoy or irritate? Is it of no use? It is of the greatest earthly use. It is a means of helping you both on to Heaven. If you must be selfish, remember it is making yourself happier to have your husband love you as he loves no other earthly being. Men, after all, are easily pleased—you found that out in your courtship days. They are easily managed too. A man will do almost everything for the wife that makes him happy. He is almost too much of a slave to her. She can do what she will to him. With him, getting her own way is only a matter of tact and sweetness. Husbands are almost all like the man in the fable of the wind and sun. The sun beat in the end. Warmth of love and sweetness of manner will gain a victory, where an ill-tempered insisting upon “rights” fails completely.
Ward McAllister says in his “Society as I Have Found It,” “My advice to all married women is to keep up flirting with their husbands as much after marriage as before; to make themselves as attractive after their marriage as they were when they captivated them; not to neglect their toilet, but rather to improve it: to be as coquettish and coy after they are bound together as before when no ties held them.”