The thing for you to do is to recognize your husband’s RIGHT to make and answer for his own mistakes.  Then drop the whole thing from your mind and calculations.

Then treat your husband as you would any man who came to visit you.  Make yourself as attractive and cultured and agreeable as possible, and look out for his comfort, but never get in his way nor question his doings.  Stand square up on your own feet and be as fine a woman as you know how to be—­as gracious a one.  If he does love some other woman it may be but a temporary infatuation and if you are attractive and kind and sensible and independent enough he may return to his first love in his own good time.

If not, why, no matter.  Just you get interested in life on your own account and let him do as he will.  If he does care for another woman he deserves credit for not deserting you, as many a man would have done.  Just respect and honor him for the good that is in him, instead of condemning him mentally because the good does not show just according to your ideas of how it should.

Love does not stay put, no matter how hard folks try to keep it put.  All we can do is to be as lovable as possible and thus do our part to attract love.

It may be that you are simply a sentimental goose who imagines her husband is “influenced” away from her, because, forsooth, he does not pay her the attentions he used to.

I was once that kind of a goose myself, and it widened a breach that did not then exist except in my mind; widened it until at last it became a real breach—­my husband went elsewhere for his companionship.  I was too morbid and finicky and exacting for a healthy man.

Just as the husband of the woman in “Confessions of a Wife,” in Century did.  I read that serial each month and feel like shaking that little simpleton!—­she is just the kind of a sentimental hair-splitting little idiot that I used to be!  Instead of getting at her husband’s point of view and enjoying with him, at least sometimes, she insists on acting the martyr because he will not dawdle around and gush at her feet.

Whatever is the cause of your trouble the only cure for it is Common-Sense.  Live your own life, cheerily, happily, and enter into your husband’s life so far as you can.  Take all the good things that come your way and rejoice in them, but don’t moon around and fuss because you can’t have the sort of love-life described in some sentimental novel.  Your business in life is to LOVE, not to be loved.  The latter is a secondary matter and the first is the thing that brings happiness to you.  Go in to win now, and you can develop within yourself the full Life that you really desire.  All you desire is yours and you will realize it in due time.  But every moment you set your thought on straightening out Some Other body’s life you are delaying your own realization and happiness.

CHAPTER XII.