“There, John! it’s just as I knew it would be; I always said you wanted a different sort of a woman for a wife.  Now, you knew when you took me that I wasn’t in the least strong-minded or sensible, but a poor little helpless thing; and you are beginning to get tired of me already.  You wish you had married a woman like Grace, I know you do.”

“Lillie, how silly!  Please do listen, now.  You have no idea how simple and easy what I want to explain to you is.”

“Well, John, I can’t to-night, anyhow, because I have a headache.  Just this talk has got my head to thumping so,—­it’s really dreadful! and I’m so low-spirited!  I do wish you had a wife that would suit you better.”  And forthwith Mrs. Lillie dissolved in tears; and John stroked her head, and petted her, and called her a nice little pussy, and begged her pardon for being so rough with her, and, in short, acted like a fool generally.

“If that woman was my wife now,” I fancy I hear some youth with a promising moustache remark, “I’d make her behave!”

Well, sir, supposing she was your wife, what are you going to do about it?

What are you going to do when accounts give your wife a sick headache, so that she cannot possibly attend to them?  Are you going to enact the Blue Beard, and rage and storm, and threaten to cut her head off?  What good would that do?  Cutting off a wrong little head would not turn it into a right one.  An ancient proverb significantly remarks, “You can’t have more of a cat than her skin,”—­and no amount of fuming and storming can make any thing more of a woman than she is. Such as your wife is, sir, you must take her, and make the best of it.  Perhaps you want your own way.  Don’t you wish you could get it?

But didn’t she promise to obey?  Didn’t she?  Of course.  Then why is it that I must be all the while yielding points, and she never?  Well, sir, that is for you to settle.  The marriage service gives you authority; so does the law of the land.  John could lock up Mrs. Lillie till she learned her lessons; he could do any of twenty other things that no gentleman would ever think of doing, and the law would support him in it.  But, because John is a gentleman, and not Paddy from Cork, he strokes his wife’s head, and submits.

We understand that our brethren, the Methodists, have recently decided to leave the word “obey” out of the marriage-service.  Our friends are, as all the world knows, a most wise and prudent denomination, and guided by a very practical sense in their arrangements.  If they have left the word “obey” out, it is because they have concluded that it does no good to put it in,—­a decision that John’s experience would go a long way to justify.

CHAPTER XIII.

JOHN’S BIRTHDAY.

“My dear Lillie,” quoth John one morning, “next week Wednesday is my birthday.”

“Is it?  How charming!  What shall we do?”