Don’t choose a wife, in the first place, for the mere exterior of a pretty face and form.  Be as alert in the choice of a wife as you are in a bargain.  You don’t invest in a house just because it looks well, or buy a suit of clothes at first sight, or dash on change and snatch at the first deal.  After you are once married stand by your choice like a man.  If you must have your beer, don’t sneak out of it on a clove and a lie; carefully weigh the cost, and if you conclude to risk everything for the gratification of an appetite drink at home and above board, and don’t attempt to deceive your wife with subterfuges and excuses.  Don’t run after other women because your wife is not so young as she once was, or because the bloom is faded a little from the face you once thought so fair.  It is the part of an Indian to retract a gift once given, or to go back on a bargain.  Don’t live together if you can’t rise above the level of fighting cats, but be careful how you throw aside the bonds that God has joined between you.  Live the lot you have chosen as bravely as you can, remembering that the thorn that you have developed will never change into a rose by mere change of circumstances.  Divorce and the mere shifting of the stage setting will never make your tragedy over into a vaudeville or a light opera.

XLIX.

Gone back to flippity-floppity skirts.

The rainy season is here again, and where is dress-reform?  My soul grew sick, the other morning as, with unfurled umbrella, lunch-basket, bundle, and draperies, I beheld the working woman on her weary march.  Give a man a petticoat, a bundle and an umbrella, and the streets would be full of capering lunatics whenever it rained.  Stay at home, did you say?  That is good advice for the woman who has nothing else to do, but in these latter days the right sort of husband don’t go round.  Either he died in the war or the stock has run low, so that more than half the well-meaning women have no homes to stay in.  What Moses is going to lead the poor creatures to the commonsense suit that shall protect them from the inclement weather they are forced to meet as they go abroad to earn their bread and salt?  It must be a concerted movement, for there is none among us who dares take the war path alone.  The children of Israel went in a crowd and so must we.  For a principle there are those among us who would die, perhaps, but there is no principle on the earth below nor in the heaven above for which we would suffer ridicule.  As for me, I have furled my banner and laid aside my bugle.  I am tired of being a martyr to an unpopular cause.  I am too big a coward to be caught making an everlasting object of myself.  I have gone back to flippity-floppity skirts and long gowns and all the rest of the “flesh pots.”  Browning says of a certain class of people:  “The dread of shame has made them tame,” and I am