to give her.  She ought to be made to feel that she has earned it, and that she may spend it freely and happily, or invest it, just as she chooses.  Do you think that you would not get the whole of it back if you were ill and needed it?  It is an ungracious thing to call her to account for every dollar.  How do you know but that she wants to save a little out of the market-money to buy you a nicer birthday present than usual?

American men are the most lavish husbands in the world.  It is only that they do not think what a joy it is to a woman to have even the smallest amount of money of her very own, concerning which no one on earth has a right to question her.

And yet, what is the use of trying to train a husband into a habit of thought like this, when he has been used to hearing his mother argue his father into giving her money, and yet to know that she and all the world considered him generous, and that, in truth, he was?

A woman who suffers heartache because her husband never apologizes to her, or who endures mortification unspeakable because she has not a penny of her own, has no right to rebel, even in her own heart, unless she is training her son to make the sort of husband for some little girl, now in pinafores, which she would have wished for herself.

A FEW MEN WHO BORE US

THE SELF-MADE MAN

Somebody has cleverly defined a bore as “a man who talks so much about himself that I never can get a chance to talk about myself.”  But that is too narrow.  I am broad-minded.  I want somebody to find a definition large enough (if possible) to include all the bores.  I do not know, however, but that I am asking too much.

Neither is this definition entirely true.  For I have heard men talk about themselves for hours at a time, and they talked so well and kept their Ego so carefully hidden that I was enchanted, and never mentioned myself, even when they paused for breath.  Then, too, I have been bored to the verge of suicide by some worthy soul who insisted upon talking to me of (presumably) my pet subject—­myself—­and who was doing his poor little best to say nice things and to be entertaining.

A bore is a man or a woman who never knows How or When.  There are times in the lives of all of us when it bores us to be talked to of home or friends or wife or husband or mother or religion.  There are times when nothing but a large, comfortable silence can soothe the worry and fret of a trying day.  At such times let the tactless woman and the thoughtless man beware, because everything they say will be a bore.

It is not wilful cruelty which makes us say that (to a woman) the word “bore” is in the masculine gender and objective case, object of our deepest detestation.  Men are oftener bores than women, for two reasons:  One is that they seldom stop to think that they could be a bore to anybody; and the second is that we women never let them see that we are being bored, for it is our aim in life to look pleasant and to keep the men’s vanity done up in pink cotton, no matter if we are secretly almost dropping from our chairs with weariness—­the utter, unspeakable weariness of the soul, compared to which weariness of the body is a luxury.