“What a lucky dog you are! I’m dying to see her.”
“But I have not seen her myself yet. I have just seen the mother. Ah! I will have that pleasure in a few days though. Then it is she return from the friend with whom she is visiting.”
“Well, I wish you luck. I hope your troubles are at an end.”
How pleasant it was, I thought, to see all these wild creatures of the ranges being rounded up into the blissful corral of matrimony! How comforting, after one’s own feathers have been trimmed, to see others joining the ranks of the wing-clipped! Love should not be represented as a rosy Cupid, but as a red-jowled recruiting sergeant. True, I have one of the best wives in the world; yet, what man is there, who, if he has ever roved the Barbary coasts of Philander Land, does not once in a while sigh for the old freedom? Marriage is a constraint to be good, against which the best of us feel moments of faint, futile rebellion.
Sometimes I wished that Anastasia was not so desperately practical. She seems to consider that I am a species of great child, and must be looked after accordingly. I am an ardent suffragist; I have always advocated the rights of woman; I have always believed in her higher destiny; I scoff at the idea that woman’s sphere is the home, and desire to see her marching shoulder to shoulder with man in the ranks of progress. Yet, alas! I cannot make a convert of Anastasia.
Often I have tried to interest her in the burning question; to inspire in her a sense of having a mission, of being oppressed; but Anastasia only laughs softly. She seems to have the ridiculous and old-fashioned idea that her duty is to make me happy, to surround me with comfortable routine, to remove from my daily path all irritating and distracting protuberances. I have left, with elaborate carelessness on her kitchen table, enough feminist literature to convert a dozen women. But Anastasia only rearranges it neatly, props an open cook-book against it, and studies some new recipe for stuffing duck.
“Ah, no,” she would say. “I must not waste my time reading. That is not serious of me. I have my ménage, my marketing, my sewing,— Oh, so much to do! If I threw away my time reading, my Lovely One might have holes in his socks; and just think what a shame that would be for me!”
Yes, it is sad to relate, but I believe if I had offered her the choice between a new hat and the vote she would take the hat.
How often have I wished she had more individuality! Her idea seems to be to mould her nature to mine, so that every day she becomes more like a faithful shadow. How anxiously she watches me as I eat my soup, so afraid it may not be to my taste! How cheerful, how patient, how eager to please she is! Oh, for a flare of temper sometimes, a sign of spirit, something to show that she is a woman of character, of originality! But no. Her duty, as she conceives it, is to minister to my material comfort, to see that I enjoy my food, to make me wrap up sufficiently. Yet in these things she is rather tyrannical, insisting on my coming home to my meals at the hour I have decided on, emphatic that I change my socks at least twice a week, indignant if I brush my hair after putting on my coat. However, she keeps my things in beautiful order, and although I feel at times that she is a little exacting I yield with good grace. After all, one ought to consider one’s wife sometimes.
On the other hand, I have insisted on some concessions on her part that are revolutionary to the French mind—that of sleeping with the window open, for instance. I over-ruled her objection that the snow and rain entering during the night, spoiled her parquet. She keeps it beautifully polished, by the way, and claims that the shining of it every day gives her enough exercise without the Swedish gymnastics I insist on her taking under my direction. But I am so anxious she should keep slim and lissom, and the exercises are certainly effective.