4. A man's vanity and selfishness are present (to a woman's perception) in every movement. She likes them. They are the characteristics of masculinity.
5. The man entered matrimony with all the trepidation born out of thinking too much about it. It seemed to him like buying a fifteen-thousand-dollar horse on instalments. This is just as it seems to Mr. Bachelor, too. It was a pretty good price, but it was a high-stepper, a flyer, a beauty. It would take him all his life to pay for it, and it might founder the first year. But he had never in his life wanted anything the way he wanted that woman. Mr. Bachelor has not yet got to that stage.
RETURNING GOOD FOR EVIL.
6. There is little doubt that, speaking of man as an animal, unchastened by the benign influence of religion, "the male hates the sick female." The female knows that. Yet in return she exhibits toward the sick male a tenderness that makes his hair stand on end when he thinks of his own short-comings.
7. The man's astonishment at reaching thirty was tremendous. He found he was changing, and that marriage was evidently
THE EXPRESS PREPARATION FOR THIS CONTINGENCY.
He used to go to the theatre a great deal. He did not then notice that the air in the auditorium was more rotten than the midnight winds that blow over Chicago from the industrious rendering-houses on her outskirts. It is now a real hardship to go to an ordinary dramatic performance, and he thinks theatre-goers are as a class the most discontented people there are in society. He used to spend his earnings in various other places which now weary him beyond measure, and are equally wearisome to those bachelor friends of his who used to keep him company, and are forced by single life, to still frequent such resorts.
THIS HE FINDS OUT
when his wife goes into the country for a week or two. Those two weeks are never halcyon days with him. There is a smell about a restaurant that eloquently pleads the sweetness of home, and there is a lack of confidence expressed in a pewter spoon and a general disinclination to believe that anyone is careful molded in with the thickness of the teacup, which startle him at once into a better conception of his wife's confidence in him.
8. My friend comes home and finds his dressing-gown and slippers in front of the fire. He is tired and cross, and doesn't want to sling ashes nor bang a coal-hod. But the sight of the fire makes him feel better at once, and if there be no fire, there are no ashes. He sits in front of a coke fire in a grate. His little girl brings his slippers and carries off his shoes—or carries off one shoe and one slipper. Then he falls to thinking that girls are poor property as compared with boys, but that any kind of children are a pretty good investment against one's old age. His increasing wonder is that the whole state of things is so natural. His wife takes comfort in having him in the same room with her. When he is reading and she is darning socks, she is the very embodiment of the fine French expression "I am content." She is not as beautiful as she once was. But