On general principles, it’s pretty good doctrine that two’s a company and three’s a crowd, except when the third is a cook.  But I should say that when the third is Helen’s ma it’s a mob, out looking for a chance to make rough-house.  A good cook, a good wife and a good job will make a good home anywhere; but you add your mother-in-law, and the first thing you know you’ve got two homes, and one of them is being run on alimony.

You want to remember that, beside your mother-in-law, you’re a comparative stranger to your wife.  After you and Helen have lived together for a year, you ought to be so well acquainted that she’ll begin to believe that you know almost as much as mamma; but during the first few months of married life there are apt to be a good many tie votes on important matters, and if mother-in-law is on the premises she is generally going to break the tie by casting the deciding vote with daughter.  A man can often get the best of one woman, or ten men, but not of two women, when one of the two is mother-in-law.

When a young wife starts housekeeping with her mother too handy, it’s like running a business with a new manager and keeping the old one along to see how things go.  It’s not in human nature that the old manager, even with the best disposition in the world, shouldn’t knock the new one a little, and you’re Helen’s new manager.  When I want to make a change, I go about it like a crab—­get rid of the old shell first, and then plunge right in and begin to do business with the new skin.  It may be a little tender and open to attack at first, but it doesn’t take long to toughen up when it finds out that the responsibility of protecting my white meat is on it.

You start a woman with sense to making mistakes and you’ve started her to learning common-sense; but you let some one else shoulder her natural responsibilities and keep her from exercising her brain, and it’ll be fat-witted before she’s forty.  A lot of girls find it mighty handy to start with mother to look after the housekeeping and later to raise the baby; but by and by, when mamma has to quit, they don’t understand that the butcher has to be called down regularly for leaving those heavy ends on the steak or running in the shoulder chops on you, and that when Willie has the croup she mustn’t give the little darling a stiff hot Scotch, or try to remove the phlegm from his throat with a button-hook.

There are a lot of women in this world who think that there’s only one side to the married relation, and that’s their side.  When one of them marries, she starts right out to train her husband into kind old Carlo, who’ll go downtown for her every morning and come home every night, fetching a snug little basketful of money in his mouth and wagging his tail as he lays it at her feet.  Then it’s a pat on the head and “Nice doggie.”  And he’s taught to stand around evenings, retrieving her gloves and handkerchief, and snapping up with a pleased licking of his chops any little word that she may throw to him.  But you let him start in to have a little fun scratching and stretching himself, or pawing her, and it’s “Charge, Carlo!” and “Bad doggie!”