In fact, the basis of treatment is the painstaking study of the individual woman and then the painstaking adjustment of that individual woman.  It may mean the adjustment of the whole life situation to that housewife, or conversely the adjustment of the housewife to the life situation.

In many marital difficulties that one sees, not so much in practice as in contact with normal married couples, the trouble reminds one of the orang-outang in Kipling’s story who had “too much Ego in his Cosmos.”  Marriage, to be successful, is based on a graceful recession of the ego in the cosmos of each of the partners.  The prime difficulty is this; people do not like to recede the ego.  And the worst offenders are the ones who are determined to stand up for the right, which usually is a disguised way of naming their desire.

One might speak of a thousand and one things that every man and every woman knows.  One might speak of the death of love and the growth of irritation, the disappearance of sympathy,—­these are the hopeless situations.  But far more common and important, though less tragic, is the disappearance of the little attentions, the little love-making, the disappearance of good manners.  Men are not the only or the worst offenders in this; the nervous housewife is very apt to be the scold and the nag.  Perhaps the neurasthenia of the husband arises from his revolt against the incessant demands of his wife, but that’s another story.

At any rate, there is what seems to be a cardinal point of difference between men and women, perhaps arising from some essential difference in make-up, perhaps in part due to difference in training.  An essential need of the average American-trained woman is sympathy, constantly expressed, constantly manifested.  The average man tends to become matter-of-fact, the average woman finds in matter-of-factness the death of love.  She acts as if she believed that the little acts of love and sympathy are the more important as manifesting the real state of feeling, that the major duties were of less importance.

On this point most men and women never seem to agree.  The man gets impatient over the constant demand for his attention.  He thinks it unreasonable and childish.  Intent upon his own struggle he is apt to think her affairs are minor matters.  He thinks his wife makes mountains out of molehills and lacks a sense of proportion.  He forgets that the devotion of the husband is the woman’s anchor to windward, her grip on safety,—­that his success and struggle are hers only in so far as he and she are intimate and lover-like.  And women, even those who trust their husbands absolutely so far as physical loyalty goes, jealously watch them for the appearance of boredom, or lack of interest, for the falling off of the lover’s spirit and feeling.