We are reminded more strongly of rough, gray boulders holding in their hearts the warmth of the sunshine for the comfortable growth of mosses that creep over and cling to and beautify them.

John is neither saint nor hero, except in Mary’s fancy sketch of the Coming Man.  He remonstrates against canonization strenuously—­dissent that passes with the idealist for modesty, and enhances her admiration.  She is oftener to blame for the disillusion than he.  With the perverseness of feminine nature she construes strength into coarseness of fibre, slowness into brutal indifference.  Until women get at the truth in this matter of self-deception, disappointment surely awaits upon awakening from Love’s young dream.

The surest guard against the shock of broken ideals is to keep ever before the mind that men are not to be measured by feminine standards of perfection.  Mary has as little perception of perspective as a Chinese landscape painter; she colors floridly and her drawing is out of line.

Put John in his proper place as regards distances, shadow and environment, and survey him in the cool white light of common sense.  Unless he is a poseur of uncommon skill, he will appear best thus.

Conjugal quarrels are so constantly the theme of ridicule and the text of warnings to the unwedded that we lose sight of the plain truth that husbands and wives bicker no more than parents and children, brothers and sisters.  In every community there are more blood-relations who do not speak to one another than divorced couples.  Wars and fightings come upon us, not through matrimony so much as through the manifold infirmities of mortal nature.  John, albeit not a woman, is a vertebrate human being, “with hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions.  If you prick him he will bleed, if you tickle him he will laugh, if you poison him he will die.”  In the true marriage, he is the wife’s other self—­one lobe of her brain—­one ventricle of her heart—­the right hand to her left.  This is the marriage the Lord hath made.

The occasional clash of opinions, the passing heat of temper, are but surface-gusts that do not stir the brooding love of hearts at rest in one another.

While John remains loyal to his wedded wife, forsaking all others and cleaving to her alone, the inventory of his faults should be a sealed book to her closest confidante, the carping discussion of his failings be prohibited by pride, affection and right taste.  This leads me to offer one last tribute to our patient (and maybe bored) subject.  He has as a rule, a nicer sense of honor in the matter of comment upon his wife’s shortcomings and foibles than she exhibits with regard to his.