It really is asking too much of a woman to expect her to bring up a husband and her children too.  She vainly imagines, when she marries this piece of perfection, with whom she is so blindly in love, that he is already trained, or, rather, that he is the one human being in the world who has been perfect from infancy, and who never needed training.  She never dreams of the curious fact that mothers always train their daughters to make good wives, yet rarely ever think of training their boys to make good husbands.

Therefore, unless, like Topsy, they have “just growed” good and kind and considerate, a woman has a life-work before her in training her own husband.

But the fact of the matter is that while we girls receive specific training, to the express end of making good wives, the boys of the family receive only general training of chivalry and courtesy towards all women—­not with a view of having to spend the greater part of their lives with one woman, or the tact with which this one woman must be treated.

I wonder what would happen if somebody should open a Select Kindergarten for Embryo Husbands?  Yet we girls have been in a similar institution for embryo wives since childhood.  We are told in our early teens:  “Well, only your mother would bear that.  No husband would;” or, “You will have to be more gentle and unselfish with your brother, if you want to make some man a good wife.”

A good wife!  It has a magic sound!

Of course, every girl expects to marry, and the shadowy idea of making a good wife to this mysterious but delightfully interesting personage, who is growing up somewhere in the world, and waiting for her, even as she is waiting for him, makes the hard task of self-discipline easier, for we all wish to make “a good wife.”

Nor are we taught alone to be gentle and sweet and faithful.  We girls have to learn that all-potent factor in a happy life—­tact.  We are early taught that it is not enough to master the fundamental principles which govern the genus man.  We have to discover that each man must be treated differently.  We must cater to individual tastes.  We must learn individual needs, and fill them.  In short, we are taught to observe men, to study them, and then to hold ourselves accordingly.

Pray do not imagine that all this is put into words, or that we have certain hours for studying how to make good wives, or that it is as rigid or exhausting as a broom drill.  It is the intangible, esoteric philosophy which permeates the households of thousands of American families, where the mothers are the companions and confidantes of the daughters.  It is an understood thing.  You would be surprised to know how young some girls are when they have thoroughly mastered this wonderful tact with men.  And what is it that makes the American girl so dangerous for all the other women in the world to compete with?  It is because she studies her man.  And how did she learn it?  By seeing her mother manage her father—­or, perhaps, by seeing how easily her father could be managed, if her mother only understood him better.