Then, when you’ve sweat along at it for a dozen years or so, you’ll wake up some morning and discover that your appearances haven’t deceived any one but yourself.  A man who tries that game is a good deal like the fellow who puts on a fancy vest over a dirty shirt—­he’s the only person in the world who can’t see the egg-spots under his chin.  Of course, there isn’t any real danger of your family’s wearing a false front while I’m alive, because I believe Helen’s got too much sense to stand for anything of the sort; but if she should, you can expect the old man around with his megaphone to whisper the real figures to your neighbors.

I don’t care how much or how little money you make—­I want you to understand that there’s only one place in the world where you can live a happy life, and that’s inside your income.  A family that’s living beyond its means is simply a business that’s losing money, and it’s bound to go to smash.  And to keep a safe distance ahead of the sheriff you’ve got to make your wife help.  More men go broke through bad management at home than at the office.  And I might add that a lot of men who are used to getting only one dollar’s worth of food for a five-dollar bill down-town, expect their wives to get five dollars’ worth of food for a one-dollar bill at the corner grocery, and to save the change toward a pair of diamond earrings.  These fellows would plant a tin can and kick because they didn’t get a case of tomatoes.

Of course, some women put their husband’s salaries on their backs instead of his ribs; but there are a heap more men who burn up their wives’ new sealskin sacques in two-bit cigars.  Because a man’s a good provider it doesn’t always mean that he’s a good husband—­it may mean that he’s a hog.  And when there’s a cuss in the family and it comes down to betting which, on general principles the man always carries my money.  I make mistakes at it, but it’s the only winning system I’ve ever been able to discover in games of chance.

You want to end the wedding trip with a business meeting and talk to your wife quite as frankly as you would to a man whom you’d taken into partnership.  Tell her just what your salary is and then lay it out between you—­so much for joint expenses, the house and the housekeeping, so much for her expenses, so much for yours, and so much to be saved.  That last is the one item on which you can’t afford to economize.  It’s the surplus and undivided profits account of your business, and until the concern accumulates a big one it isn’t safe to move into offices on Easy Street.

A lot of fool fathers only give their fool daughters a liberal education in spending, and it’s pretty hard to teach those women the real facts about earning and saving, but it’s got to be done unless you want to be the fool husband of a fool wife.  These girls have an idea that men get money by going to a benevolent old party behind some brass bars and shoving a check at him and telling him that they want it in fifties and hundreds.