The love you both bear this same oft-perplexed John should be at once solvent and cement, melting hardness, and uniting seemingly antagonistic elements.

Above all things, as John’s wife, never criticise his mother to him.  If he sympathizes with you, he is disloyal to his mother; if not, you consider him unfeeling, and immediately accuse him of “taking sides” against you.  Think for one moment of your own boy, perhaps still a mere baby.  Does it not, even now, grieve you to the heart to think that the day will come when he will discuss and acknowledge your faults to anyone, albeit his listener is only his wife?  If John is the man he should be, he fancies that his mother is “a creature all too bright and good” to be criticised, and, as you want your son to have the same opinion of his mother, uphold John in his fealty, and scorn to destroy such blessed love and faith.  Make the effort to see John’s mother with his eyes, and by so doing make him love you better, and prove yourself worthy to be the wife of a true man and the mother of a son who will be as leal and steadfast as his father.

CHAPTER XVII.

AND OTHER RELATIONS-IN-LAW

The other day I chanced to be a listener to the conversation of two young married women.  They were making their plans for the coming week.  One of them remarked, drearily: 

“Henry’s sister and her husband are to spend next Sunday with me.”

“Are they!” exclaimed the other.  “And my husband’s father and mother are to honor me by a visit on the same day.”

For a moment there was silence, then No. 1 said in an awed voice: 

“My dear, you and I need the prayers of the congregation.  We are both objects of pity.  Our relations-in-law are upon us!”

Within my secret self I pondered whether or not the visitors dreaded the expected ordeal as much as the visited did.

The phrases, “my husband’s relatives,” “my wife’s family,” are seldom pronounced without an accompanying bitter thought.  John tolerates Mary’s kin, and Mary regards John’s father and mother, sisters and brothers with an ill-concealed distrust and enmity.  Sometimes there is just cause for this antagonistic feeling; more frequently it is the outcome of custom.  It is fashionable to regard connections by marriage as necessary evils.  Some families, resolved to make the best of that which is inevitable, put a smiling face upon the whole matter, and hide from the outside world the knowledge of their chagrin.  No mother has ever seen the girl she thought quite good enough for her boy whom she considers the model of all that is noble and manly, while that sister is rare who feels that the wife chosen by her favorite brother is what “the dear boy really needs as a life-long companion.”  Once in a great while, when the chosen bride by some remarkable chance happens to suit the family fancy, the whole world is informed of the fact, and the bride elect inwardly pronounces John’s blood relations to be “awfully gushing” or “desperately hypocritical.”  The happy medium is difficult of attainment.