"Well then, until you see him do it to me, never do it to your sister. Men are gentle and polite to women, and little boys should be gentle and polite to little girls."
The children ran off to their play, and Helen said,
"Now how different that is from my mother's management with us! She always made us girls yield to the boys. They would not have thought they could go up to bed unless one of us got a candle for them."
"That, I suppose, is the reason then that Ernest expected me to wait upon him after we were married," I replied. "I was a little stiff about yielding to him, for besides mother's precepts, I was influenced by my father's example. He was so courteous, treating her with as much respect as if she were a queen, and yet with as much love as if were always a girl. I naturally expected the like from my husband."
"You must have been disappointed then," she said.
"Yes, I was. It cost me a good many pouts and tears of which I am now ashamed. And Ernest seldom annoys me now with the little neglects that I used to make so much of."
"Sometimes I think there are no 'little' neglects," said Helen. "It takes less than nothing to annoy us."
"And it takes more than everything to please us!" I cried. "But Ernest and I had one stronghold to which we always fled in our troublous times, and that was our love for each other. No matter how he provoked me by his little heedless ways, I had to forgive him because I loved him so. And he had to forgive me my faults for the same reason."
"I had no idea husbands and wives loved each other so," said Helen. "I thought they got over it as soon as their cares and troubles came on, and just jogged on together, somehow."
We both laughed and she went on.