There is a good deal of progressive thought among girls in this generation.

Why in the world mothers train their girls and boys alike up to a certain point in general courtesy and consideration for each other, and then go on with the girls, teaching them the gentle, faithful finesse which every wife has to understand, yet leaves her boy to “gang his ain gait” just at the formative period of his life, I am not able to say.

If I could only hear some mother say to her son, “Don’t let your slate-pencil squeak so!  Try not to make distracting noises.  You may have a nervous wife, and you might just as well learn to be quiet.  There is no sense in thinking just because you are a boy that you can make unnecessary and superfluous noises!” I think I should die of joy!  Or how would it sound to hear her say, “Whenever you come in and find your sister irritable, don’t simply take yourself out of her way.  Look around and do something kind for her.  Make a point of knowing what she likes and of doing it.  Life is so much more monotonous for women than for men, you should be especially generous with your sister, so that some day you will make some sweet girl a good husband.”

Can’t you just see what kind of a husband that boy would make?

Romance comes later to a boy than to a girl, but it hits him just as hard when it does come, and a boy is quite as responsive as a girl to the suggestion of a personal chivalry which shall prepare him to be a better husband to a shadowy personality which he cannot do better than to keep in his mind and heart.

Why does a woman, who finds it difficult, perhaps even impossible, to persuade her husband to do certain essential things, never take pity on the poor little girl across the street, who, in ten or fifteen years, is going to marry her son?

Take, at random, the subject of a wife’s having an allowance.  Thousands of wives have it, and therefore they are not the ones we are to consider.  But where there are thousands who possess an allowance from their husbands, or who have money in their own right, there are millions who never have a cent they are not obliged to ask their husbands for.

There is no question of gift about it.  At the altar he endowed her with all his worldly goods, and he thinks he has lived up to the letter of his vow when he tells her that all he has is as much hers as his.  But unless that oft-quoted saying is followed up by a certain sum, no matter how small, which is in truth her very own, she feels that that clause in the marriage service might as well be stricken out.

When wives as universally share in adding to the general prosperity of the home—­by managing the house, keeping their husband’s clothes in order, and caring for the children—­as men always admit is the case, wives are actually adding dollars to their husband’s income.  Then ought not a man to divide that same income with her in the form of an allowance, for which, if only to add to her self-respect, he has no more right to call her to account than she has to insist on seeing a list of his expenditures?