And above all trust the One Spirit to run you both.

If you do this your wife will rise fast in your esteem.  And the higher she finds herself in your esteem the harder she will try to please you—­ and rise higher.

And, girls, don’t forget that the shoe fits equally well the other foot.  Either man or wife can bring harmony out of chaos simply by respecting the other half and all his or her acts.

A marriage without “even a pinhead of bitterness” is a marriage without a pin-point of fault-finding, mental or oral.

CHAPTER II.

A TALE OF WOE.

“Why is it that, in more than two-thirds of families the wife and mother bears not only the children but the burdens and heartaches?  The husband supplies the money (generally not enough), the wife has the care of a growing and increasing family, the best of everything is saved for ‘Father’ and he is waited on, etc.  If the children annoy him he goes to his club; if the wife dies, why there are plenty more women for the asking.  Thousands of women are simply starving for Love and men are either willfully blind or wholly and utterly selfish.  You possibly know that this is quite true.  Another thing that has caused me many a time to question everything:  During the Christmas holidays many times I have seen half-clad, hungry, shivering little ones gazing longingly into the wonderful show windows, wanting probably just one toy, while children no more worthy drive by in carriages, having more than they want.  Love, home, mother, everything; on the other hand hunger, want, blues (many times), and both God’s children.  Let us hear what you have to say about this.”  B. B.

Why does the mother in two-thirds of the families bear not only the children but the burdens and heartaches? Because she is too thoughtless and inert not to.  It is easier to submit to bearing children than it is to rise up and take command of her own body.  It is easier to carry burdens than to wake up and fire them.  It is easier to “bear” things and grumble than it is to kick over the traces and change them.  To be sure, most women are yet under the hypnotic spell of the old race belief that it is woman’s duty to “submit” herself to any kind of an old husband; but that is just what I said—­women find it easier to go through life half asleep rather than to think for themselves.  Paul says a woman is not to think, she is to ask her husband to think for her. (At least that is what the translators say Paul says.  Privately, I have my suspicions that those manly translators helped Paul to say a bit more than he meant to.) It is easier to let her husband think for her even when she doesn’t like his thoughts.  So she uses her brain in grumbling instead of thinking.