THIS HE FINDS OUT

when his wife goes into the country for a week or two.  Those two weeks are never halcyon days with him.  There is a smell about a restaurant that eloquently pleads the sweetness of home, and there is a lack of confidence expressed in a pewter spoon and a general disinclination to believe that anyone is careful molded in with the thickness of the teacup, which startle him at once into a better conception of his wife’s confidence in him.

8.  My friend comes home and finds his dressing-gown and slippers in front of the fire.  He is tired and cross, and doesn’t want to sling ashes nor bang a coal-hod.  But the sight of the fire makes him feel better at once, and if there be no fire, there are no ashes.  He sits in front of a coke fire in a grate.  His little girl brings his slippers and carries off his shoes—­or carries off one shoe and one slipper.  Then he falls to thinking that girls are poor property as compared with boys, but that any kind of children are a pretty good investment against one’s old age.  His increasing wonder is that the whole state of things is so natural.  His wife takes comfort in having him in the same room with her.  When he is reading and she is darning socks, she is the very embodiment of the fine French expression “I am content.”  She is not as beautiful as she once was.  But

ALL THE ELEMENTS OF HER BEAUTY

are still present, and with a return of the flesh she has lost in hard work she will have all her looks.  A handsome woman is just as handsome to a man as a handsome girl is to a green young man like Mr. Bachelor.  My friend is hugging the shores of personal expense very closely for the purpose of having two weeks in the country with his wife during the heat of July.  This woman’s face does not intoxicate him as it once unquestionably did.  Neither does the “Trovatore miserere,” nor the “William Tell” or “Poet and Peasant” overtures so delight him as once upon a time.  Nevertheless there is in him a secret joy of possession, calm and pleasant, in contemplating the wife, and a quiet satisfaction, in hearing the music, that the taste of his youth was so thoroughly good.

A WIFE’S PRAYER.

9.  When his wife goes to bed she loves to put her head on her husband’s knees to say her prayers, and he loves to have her.  He has great confidence in a woman’s prayers, and he is disposed, selfishly but correctly, to believe the supplication is nearly dual in its character.  In his speech he treats his wife as though she were the wife of an honored friend.  If he talked either loosely or coarsely to his wife he might fall in love with any woman to whom he showed greater respect.  He would, beside, proclaim his folly, for woman has small sense of humor.

DEATH OR WORSE.