Of course, no man ever believes when he marries that he’s going to wind up as kind Carlo, who droops his head so that the children can pull his ears, and who sticks up his paw so as to make it easier for his wife to pull his leg.  But it’s simpler than you think.

As long as fond fathers slave and ambitious mothers sacrifice so that foolish daughters can hide the petticoats of poverty under a silk dress and crowd the doings of cheap society into the space in their heads which ought to be filled with plain, useful knowledge, a lot of girls are going to grow up with the idea that getting married means getting rid of care and responsibility instead of assuming it.

A fellow can’t play the game with a girl of this sort, because she can’t play fair.  He wants her love and a wife; she wants a provider, not a lover, and she takes him as a husband because she can’t draw his salary any other way.  But she can’t return his affection, because her love is already given to another; and when husband and wife both love the same person, and that person is the wife, it’s usually a life sentence at hard labor for the husband.  If he wakes up a little and tries to assert himself after he’s been married a year or so, she shudders and sobs until he sees what a brute he is; or if that doesn’t work, and he still pretends to have a little spirit, she goes off into a rage and hysterics, and that usually brings him to heel again.  It’s a mighty curious thing how a woman who has the appetite and instincts of a turkey—­buzzard will often make her husband believe that she’s as high-strung and delicate as a canary-bird!

It’s been my experience that both men and women can fool each other before marriage, and that women can keep right along fooling men after marriage, but that as soon as the average man gets married he gets found out.  After a woman has lived in the same house with a man for a year, she knows him like a good merchant knows his stock, down to any shelf-worn and slightly damaged morals which he may be hiding behind fresher goods in the darkest corner of his immortal soul.  But even if she’s married to a fellow who’s so mean that he’d take the pennies off a dead man’s eyes (not because he needed the money, but because he hadn’t the change handy for a two-cent stamp), she’ll never own up to the worst about him, even to herself, till she gets him into a divorce court.

I simply mention these things in a general way.  Helen has shown signs of loving you, and you’ve never shown any symptoms of hating yourself, so I’m not really afraid that you’re going to get the worst of it now.  So far as I can see, your mother-in-law is the only real trouble that you have married.  But don’t you make the mistake of criticizing her to Helen or of quarrelling with her.  I’ll attend to both for the family.  You simply want to dodge when she leads with the right, take your full ten seconds on the floor, and come back with your left cheek turned toward her, though, of course, you’ll