Art is a hard mistress, and there is no art quite as hard as that so being a wife.
So many women exhaust their artistic power in getting married, which is, after all, a comparatively easy business. It takes a perfect artist to remain married – married in the perfect sense of the term; but most of us have to be content to muddle through.
Imagine a girl call upon without a single lesson to produce a tune – a lot of tune –in fact – one never ending succession of harmonies from the most difficult instrument in the world. Note that the instrument not only gets grumpy in cold weather and skittish in the spring – not only slacks or breaks its string with every change of temperature , but becomes tempestuous over a tight shoes, broody over an out-of-date egg, and cross , sulky or mirthful for reason that no sane woman can understand.
That is what the average wife has to reckon with, and if she intends to play the game – humiliating as some may think it; ‘he’ will loom largely on the horizon all her life.
I hope she may find it worthwhile to take a few hints from an old hand. Don’t think that there is any satisfactory substitute for love between husband and wife. Respect and esteem make a good foundation, but they won’t do alone.
Don’t think that, because you have married for love, you can never know a moment’s unhappiness. Life is not a bed of roses, but love will help to extract the thorns. Expectation of life to be all sunshine will shock you, besides, if there are no clouds, you will lose the opportunity of showing your husband what a good chum you can be.
