“O, I don’t know!” laughed the bride. “I enjoy being warned a little. It makes it all seem excitingly difficult.”
“You mean being warned a little more, for you must have been warned a great deal already.”
“Yes. All of one’s friends help a little. Marriage is like a country surprise party each guest of which has been asked to ‘Please furnish Advice.’ Aunt Levina said: ‘My dear, marriage is like medicine—it isn’t so much what you take as what you believe it is going to do.’ Papa said: ‘Madge, girl, ask your mother how she hypnotized me. That is the most painless way it can possibly be done.’ Mother said simply: ‘Always be his sweetheart;’ which amounts to about the same, I suppose, as Mrs. Kansett’s counsel: ‘Make all other women seem less interesting to him than yourself.’ Major Carringward said: ‘Boss him, Madge; boss him. But never boss him when he is bossing you.’ You see it was all nice and easy. I shouldn’t have any trouble at all.”
“I was wondering,” I said, “while you were enumerating these items of advice, what sort of directions they gave to Bert—I mean beyond ‘Be good to her, my boy.’ If they give a man less advice, perhaps it is because there is less latitude for advice to him. ‘Be good to her’ is a comprehensive gospel for him. Then it may be that she gets more advice because the situation really is more in her hands. Anyway, it begins to look as if the world had begun to insist that he shall be good to her. Even the world’s advice to her is advice looking to that end. That all the world loves a lover means nothing more than that. The lover who stops loving has lost the world’s love as well as everything else.”
“I must tell you,” said the bride, “what brother Cliff said not long ago. He had been sitting at the window studying Life a long time, when he looked up and said: ‘Mama, aren’t there any happy married people?’ We all laughed. Probably that didn’t make the matter any clearer to Cliff.”
“We shouldn’t draw too severe an inference from satire. Perhaps satire is like news—it exploits the variations, the unusual. It takes happy marriages for granted, which is what nature does about everything that goes rightly. That’s what my friend the editor tells me. ‘Why!’ he says, ‘the biggest compliment we can pay virtue is to advertise vice. Can’t you see that we stamp vice as exceptional when we class scandals with accidents?’ Yet it is too bad that we have to hear so much more about the failures than the successes. It is likely to have an effect upon us at times such as you observed in your young brother. Marriage is not only what they that marry make it. It is also what the onlookers make it. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson’s saying about books, marriage should help us either to enjoy life or to endure it, and if it is to go on filling that great office it is quite important that you American girls, who are credited with introducing so many modifications, should keep this in mind.”
“I don’t know that I should feel quite comfortable,” said the bride, “if I thought that so much really was left to me. It would be a great responsibility—greater, I think, than I should care to take up. You and the rest must forgive me if I forget all the advice.”
“That is just what we all should hope that you will do. A woman’s reason is the best of all reasons—especially for friendship and love. A friendship that could be explained would be stamped with inferiority. We love our friend—because. We marry whom we marry—because, and we may thank Providence that it is so.”
“Yes,” she said, looking very earnestly at me, “when it is ‘because,’ it is more likely to last, I think.”
Then a sudden change came into her face, the loveliest change that ever can come into a girl’s face. I knew that he was walking up the path.