Moreover, Mary must understand that John the lover and John the husband have very different ways of showing affection.  The lover would loiter evening after evening waiting for other guests to go home that he might have time for a few tender words with his sweetheart.  Woman’s logic reasons,—­“what more natural when he has hours of time than for him to keep on saying those same tender words, only very many more of them?” The fact remains that he does not.  After the kiss of welcome on his arrival home at the close of day, he is unsentimental enough to want his dinner, and, that disposed of, he buries himself behind his newspaper, from which perhaps he does not emerge before nine o’clock when he is ready to talk to Mary and to be entertained by her.

And yet this John of whom I am talking is as good morally, as faithful and conscientious in his manly way as Mary in her womanly.

But—­suppose he were not a good man, what then?  Could the mere fact of his union with her change his entire nature?

A good man may be made better by association with a good woman; a man with repressed evil tendencies may have them held more firmly in check by his wife’s restraining influence, but no woman should undertake to “make over” a man who has given way to the wicked passions of his being until they are beyond his control.  He will not be made a reputable member of society and a bright and shining light to the community in which he dwells, by marrying.  He does not go into the new life as a sort of Keeley cure,—­a reformatory institution.  A woman’s strongest and weakest point is her power of idealizing every cold fact with which she comes in contact.  She loves a handsome roue.  He tells her that if she will but take him in training she can make a new man of him; that her fair hand can wipe all the dark spots from his past life, smooth the rough places and elevate the depressions in his character until it will be once more goodly to contemplate.  And over the stereopticon view of the man his fiancee throws the rosecolored light of her idealistic lantern, and believes all he says.  Of course during their engagement he frequently slips back into the old path, sometimes has a downfall that shocks and horrifies her who would reform him, but, once more trimming and turning up the wick, she bathes him in the pink light and remembers that he is not yet as entirely under her influence as he will be some day.  She would think it cruel injustice were some unprejudiced observer to suggest that if he cannot change his life when the possibilities of winning her are at stake, he will hardly do so when the prize is his own.

It is doubtful if a man whose whole nature has become stunted, warped and foul by sin, has in him the ability to love a true woman as she deserves to be loved.  I do not mean to intimate that his devotion to her is feigned, but it is only such attachment as he is capable of, and is no more to be compared with the unselfish love that she freely lavishes upon him, than the mud-begrimed slush which settles in city gutters to the snowy blanket covering country fields.