Their Specialty
Written by a dealer in electric washing machines:
“Don’t kill your wife. Get one of our machines to do the dirty work.”
* * *
Friend tells us that the way Clinton’s in New Haven advertises the record is: “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming with Male Chorus, $1.25.” This ad was evidently written by the gent who said: “I stand back of every bed I sell.”
* * *
With a girl of twenty, marriage is an adventure; at twenty-five, a career; at thirty, a goal; and at forty, a haven of rest.
Whiz Bang Editorials
“The Bull is Mightier Than the Bullet.”
In the old days, to the women fell the task of making gentlemen of the men, but not now-a-days, according to our friend, Bob Toole, who claims that the boys keep the girls in line during this grand and glorious age of jazz.
In dancing, conversing, playing, courting and “spooning,” the standards of young boys and girls were fixed in the good old colonial days, by the girls. Their natural feminine modesty erected sensible social barriers and the chivalry of men made them sacred and preserved them.
This order has been changed. Men now fix the standards. Naturally, they are not as high as they “used to be.” A man is not as particular in things moral and esthetic as the average girl. The modern man makes a jazz hound of his lady. The modern girl endures a lot of things she inherently dislikes. She puts up with annoying behavior just to be a good fellow. She really doesn’t like this cheek-to-cheek and wiggly dancing; but she stands for it, for she is too good a scout to be a kill-joy. And just because she is such a good fellow about it, the men—good-hearted fools!—become less lax in their behavior until they unconsciously impose on good nature.
Fellows, we’re going back again to the standards set by the natural modesty and sweet reserve of the girls! And we’re going to like it, too!
With wine gone, a “powerful” incentive to excessive “good fellowship” has been removed. With equal suffrage a fact, girls will unconsciously resent extreme impositions on their fine comradeship. There is certain to be a good natured reaction on a part of the ladies. They are going to set new standards. Not by law; by sweet common sense. Femininity will never revert to prudery, but girls are going to amend sensibly that “go-as-far-as-you-like” policy of good fellowship so that men will realize girls are less common and more wonderful than ever before.
And, we repeat, we’ll like it.
Go to it, girls! Make us be good!
* * *
An Ohio editor allows that a man in Columbus got himself into a ton of trouble by marrying two women without the formality of divorce from the first. A Western observer points out that a good many men in that section had gotten that way by marrying just one. A Southern editor has retorted by alleging that quite a few of his friends found trouble enough by merely promising to marry without going any further. And an old doughboy friend of ours collected a goodly surplussage of grief when he was simply found in company with another man’s wife.
* * *
If two souls are happily mated, there is no reason why either should live in or refer to the past. Their Eden is in the present and the future of what may be and not what has been. The man or woman should be sacredly silent about the dead past, unless there is some person or something which sooner or later may rise to bring darkness or death. The Bible basis of marriage is a love which takes for better or worse the heart which it calls its own. People ought not to marry unless they are so devoted to each other that any later knowledge of what either may have been or done would make no difference.
Man’s inhumanity to woman is often earthly, selfish and devilish. Women are naturally and generally better than men. If they err, it is usually the man’s fault. The average young man is fortunate to secure any girl to live with him as his wife. Keep still and ask no questions is the wise way. There is no double moral standard for speech or silence for man or woman. At the marriage altar, heaven demands no more of the woman than of the man. That a woman should tell the past to a man who insists, though it is none of his business, or that she should persist in confessing to him when he does not care to hear it, is a piece of folly of which some women are guilty. Where ignorance is bliss “’tis folly to be wise.” After marriage it will do no good to tell what you said and did before. There are many homes now happy, as if made under the wings of the angels, whose members at one time left the paradise of innocence and wandered beneath a roofless world.
Love is blind. A true and genuine lover does not want to hear a girl’s past; and if he did hear it from her own or another’s lips, it would make no difference to him. If any one is to tell let it be the man, for usually it is the woman and not he who runs the risk of a past. Let the man confess who places the material above the mental and moral and thinks of a wife as a cheap luxury, and of home as a dry-dock of repairs. No matter how greatly discrowned, a woman may be recrowned. With her, heaven is in the future and not in any past, she may serve, give, work and pray with the love that is the crown jewel in her diadem.
The sweetheart who is willing to be a wife is not man’s inferior or superior, but equal in personal equivalent. The mere accident or providence of sex does not entitle a man to any special privileged of conduct before or after he is husband. Man’s character is judged by his estimate of women. Such a poem as Hood’s “Bridge of Sighs” or Goldsmith’s “Folly” would be impossible if men remembered not to act the part of Faust to Margaret.
“Go in peace and sin no more,” was the command to the fallen woman. Confess to the one you have wronged, but don’t make a boastful show before others. There are converted sinners in the pulpit and prayer meeting who make a glory of their shame, unmindful of the advice, “See thou tell no man.” It is the unpardonable sin of society that it would cast and keep in deeper hell the woman with a past, though she be willing to purify herself in the fire of remorse and baptize herself with tears of repentance.
Many a girl who once glittered in Folly’s and Fashion’s court has later met and learned a true love. She was silent and devoted and today shines a holy flame in the home as wife and mother. A woman may tell what she is and hopes to be—not what she has been. The man who is fool and fiend enough to insist that the Sphinx speak is unworthy of her. Let a man remember to forgive and forget a woman’s past, as he hopes to have a happy home here and hereafter.
* * *