Sometimes he is marred in the making.

The most loyal wife admits to her inmost self in the most confidential season of self-communion, that she could have brought up her husband better than his mother or whatever feminine relative had the training of him succeeded in doing.  An opinion which, I remark, is not shared by the relative in question.  The mother of a growing son will know how to sympathize with her Mamma-in-law, when her own son—­

    “—­will a-wooing go,
     Whether his mother will or no.”

I am John’s advocate and best friend, but I cannot withhold the admission that he has some grave faults, and one or two incurable disabilities.  Grappling, forthwith, with the most obstinate of these last—­I name it boldly.  John is not—­he never can be—­and would not be if he could—­a woman.  Taking into consideration the incontrovertible truth that nobody but a woman ever understood another woman—­the situation is serious enough.  So desperate in fact, that every mother’s daughter of the missionary sex is fired with zealous desire to mend it, and chooses for a subject her own special John—­in esse or in posse.

This may sound like badinage, but it is uttered in sad earnest.  The wife’s irrational longing to extract absolute sympathy of taste, opinion and feeling, from her wedded lord, is a baneful growth which is as sure to spring up about the domestic hearth as pursley—­named by the Indian, “the white man’s foot”—­to show itself about the squatter’s door.  Once rooted it is as hard to eradicate as plantain and red sorrel.

I brand it as “irrational,” because common sense shows the extreme improbability that two people—­born of different stocks, and brought up in different households—­the man, sometimes, in no household at all—­should each be the exact counterpart of the other; should come together provided respectively, with the very qualities, likes and dislikes, that the partner needs and prefers.

Add to the improbability aforesaid the inevitable variance of views upon divers important subjects consequent upon the standpoint masculine and the standpoint feminine, and the wonder grows—­not that some marriages are unhappy, but that a large percentage of wedded couples jog on comfortably, and, if not without jar, without open scandal.  That they do speaks volumes for the wisdom of Him who ordained marriage as man’s best estate—­and something—­not volumes—­perhaps, but a pamphlet or two—­in behalf of human powers of philosophical endurance.

Before going farther it would be well to look our subject in the face—­inspect it fairly and without prejudice pro or con.