“You’re a darling, Lyddie,” said the elder woman, kissing her again; “but you are certainly too absurd!”
BOOK III
A SUITABLE MARRIAGE
CHAPTER XVIII
TWO SIDES TO THE QUESTION
Lydia’s unmarried life had given her but few abstract ideas for the regulation of conduct, and fewer still ideals of self-discipline, but chief among the small assortment that she took away from her mother’s house had been the high morality of keeping one’s husband unworried by one’s domestic difficulties. “Domestic difficulties” meant, apparently, anything disagreeable that happened to one. Not only her mother, but all the matrons of her acquaintance had concentrated on the extreme desirability of this wifely virtue. “It pays! It pays!” Mrs. Emery had often thus chanted the praises of this quality in her daughter’s presence. “I’ve noticed ever so many times that men who have to worry about domestic machinery and their children don’t get on so well. Their minds are distracted. Their thoughts can’t be, in the nature of things, all on their business.” She was wont to go on, to whatever mother she was addressing, “We know, my dear Mrs. Blank, don’t we, how perfectly distracting the problems are in bringing up children—to say nothing of servants. How much energy would men have for their own affairs if they had to struggle as we do, I’d like to know! Besides, if one person’s got to be bothered with such things, she might as well do it all and be done with it. It’s easier, besides, to have only one head. Men that interfere about things in the house are an abomination. You can’t keep from quarreling with them—angels couldn’t.”
She had once voiced this universally recognized maxim before Dr. Melton, who had cut in briskly with a warm seconding of her theory. “Yes, indeed; in the course of my practice I have often thought, as you do, that it would be easier all around if husbands didn’t board with their wives at all.”
Mrs. Emery had stared almost as blankly as Mrs. Sandworth herself might have done. “I never said such a crazy thing,” she protested.