It’s been my experience that most women try to prove their love by talking about it, and most men by spending money.  But when a pocketbook or a mouth is opened too often nothing but trouble is left in it.

Don’t forget the little attentions due your wife, but don’t hurt the grocer’s feelings or treat the milkman with silent contempt in order to give them to her.  You can hock your overcoat before marriage to buy violets for a girl, but when she has the run of your wardrobe you can’t slap your chest and explain that you stopped wearing it because you’re so warm-blooded.  A sensible woman soon begins to understand that affection can be expressed in porterhouse steaks as well as in American beauties.  But when Charlie, on twenty-five a week, marries a fool, she pouts and says that he doesn’t love her just the same because he takes her to the theatre now in the street-cars, instead of in a carriage, as he used to in those happy days before they were married.  As a matter of fact, this doesn’t show that she’s losing Charlie’s love, but that he’s getting his senses back.  It’s been my experience that no man can really attend to business properly when he’s chased to the office every morning by a crowd of infuriated florists and livery-men.

Of course, after a girl has spent a year of evenings listening to a fellow tell her that his great ambition is to make her life one grand, sweet song, it jars her to find the orchestra grunting and snoring over the sporting extra some night along six months after the ceremony.  She stays awake and cries a little over this, so when he sees her across the liver and bacon at breakfast, he forgets that he’s never told her before that she could look like anything but an angel, and asks, “Gee, Mame, what makes your nose so red?” And that’s the place where a young couple begins to adjust itself to life as it’s lived on Michigan Avenue instead of in the story-books.

There’s no rule for getting through the next six months without going back to mamma, except for the Brute to be as kind as he knows how to be and the Angel as forgiving as she can be.  But at the end of that time a boy and girl with the right kind of stuff in them have been graduated into a man and a woman.  It’s only calf love that’s always bellering about it.  When love is full grown it has few words, and sometimes it growls them out.

I remember, when I was a youngster, hearing old Mrs. Hoover tell of the trip she took with the Doc just after they were married.  Even as a young fellow the Doc was a great exhorter.  Knew more Scripture when he was sixteen than the presiding elder.  Couldn’t open his mouth without losing a verse.  Would lose a chapter when he yawned.

Well, when Doc was about twenty-five, he fell in love with a mighty sweet young girl, Leila Hardin, who every one said was too frivolous for him.  But the Doc only answered that it was his duty to marry her to bring her under Christian influences, and they set off down the river to New Orleans on their honeymoon.