SIX BAD HUSBANDS AND SIX
UNHAPPY WIVES
I
The first bad husband had been a very good man until he married. He had built up a successful business and a fair name for himself, and he had done it all without help, and without harming any one else.
He climbed without pulling others down; and he did little acts of kindness as he went along, never hesitating to give a dollar where he felt it was needed, even when anxious about the coming of another dollar to fill its place.
He helped indigent relatives; he aided a widowed cousin to educate her daughter, and always remembered the children in his neighbourhood at Christmas time.
And when he was thirty-two, he decided to settle down and have a home of his own. He married a young woman who had distinguished herself as a bright scholar at college, and he took her away from the drudgery of the schoolroom, where she had been teaching for two years after she graduated. He placed her in a pretty home, and gave her every comfort and all his love and attention.
The wife kept the home in good order, and seemed to be very well satisfied with her condition for a time. When people praised her husband for what he had accomplished alone and with no help, rising from the ranks, as it were, to a place of influence in life's army, she smiled and showed satisfaction.
But after a year passed by she began to wish her husband had acquired more polish—that he had enjoyed better advantages—and she found herself irritated by his manners and his speech.
It pleased her immensely when any one spoke of her as 'a superior woman.' She related such compliments to her husband; and he, too, was pleased, and told her how fortunate he was to have won a wife of such intellectual brilliancy.
Ofttimes he repeated similar compliments to her; telling how proud he felt when other people recognised his good luck. But, little by little, the pride of the husband abated; and just in proportion to the growing self-satisfaction of the wife. As she talked more, he talked less; he grew taciturn; his speech became halting, and his manner constrained.