That word demand troubles me a little.  So many women demand—­and demand terribly!  But what they demand is indulgence, sympathy, interest—­I think sometimes that they crave a man’s utter absorption in themselves much as a man craves strong drink.  It is their form of intoxication.  Such demanding is not, of course, what I mean.  Demand nothing for yourself, beyond simple justice.  Not love, for that flies at the very sound of demand, and dies before nagging.  But demand for the man himself, call upon his nobler qualities, and don’t let him palm off on you his second-best.  Many a man is loved and honored by his business associates whose wife and children never catch a glimpse of the finer side of him.  Demand the exercise of these fine traits in the home.  Demand that he be a fine man in the eyes of his children as in the eyes of his friends.  Be sure that he will rise to the occasion with a splendid sense of having, now, a home that is a home, of having a wife who is wived to the man he likes best to be.

This bids fair to be—­as I knew it would, if once I permitted myself to write at all on the subject—­not a paragraph, but a whole essay—­or perhaps, if I did not check myself, a whole volume!  But after all, what I want to say is merely that as no child can be born without a father, so he cannot be properly trained without a father’s daily assistance.  And that, since most fathers come to the task even more untrained than the mothers, some training must be undertaken.  By whom?  By the mother.  It is, I solemnly believe, your duty to go ahead a little on this part of the journey, find out what ought to be done, and teach, coax, induce your husband to co-operate with you in these things.  No one knows better than you do that he is only a boy at heart after all—­perhaps the very dearest boy of them all.  This boy you have to help while yet the other children are little—­but be sure that, as you teach him, so, all the time, will he teach you.  Every principle laid down in this book, above all others the principle of freedom, will apply to him.  He will take the lessons a trifle more reluctantly but more lastingly than the younger boys; and in a little while you will be envied of all your women friends because of the competency, the reliability, the contentment of your children’s father.

THE UNCONSCIOUS INFLUENCE

When all is said and done, it remains true that the finest, the most subtle and penetrating influence in education is precisely that education for which no rules can be laid down.  It is the silent influence of the motives which impel the persons who constantly surround us.  If we examine for a little our own childhood we see at once that this is so.  What are those canons of conduct by which we judge others and even occasionally ourselves?  Whence came that list of impossible things, those things that are so closed to us that we cannot, even under great stress, of temptation, conceive ourselves as yielding to them?