It is a radical, practical impossibility to bring loving-kindness out of any one by demanding it.  Loving-kindness, thoughtfulness, and consideration have got to be born spontaneously in a man’s own mind to be anything at all, and no amount of demanding on the part of his wife can force it.

When this little lady of whom I have been writing found that she had been demanding from her husband what he really ought to have given her as a matter of course, and that she had used up all her strength in suffering because he did not give it, and had used none of her strength in the effort to be patient and quiet in waiting for him to come to his senses, she went home and began a new life.  She was a plucky little woman and very intelligent when once her eyes were opened.  She recognized the fact that her suffering was resistance to her husband’s irritable selfishness, and she stopped resisting.

It was a long and hard struggle of days, weeks, and months, but it brought a very happy reward.  When a man is irritable and ugly, and his wife offers no resistance either in anger or suffering, the irritability and ugliness react upon himself, and if there is something better in him he begins to perceive the irritability in its true colors.  That is what happened to this man.  As his wife stopped demanding he began to give.  As his wife’s nerves became calm and quiet his nerves quieted and calmed.  Finally his wife discovered that much of his irritability had been roused through nervous anxiety in regard to his business about which he had told her nothing whatever because it “was not his way.”

There is nothing in the world that so strengthens nerves as the steady use of the will to drop resistance and useless emotions and get a quiet control.  This woman gained that strength, and to her surprise one day her husband turned to her with a full account of all his business troubles and she met his mind quietly, as one business man might meet another, and without in the least expressing her pleasure or her surprise.  She took all the good change in him as a matter of course.

Finally one day it came naturally and easily to talk over the past.  She found that her husband from day to day had dreaded coming home.  The truth was that he had dreaded his own irritability as much as he had dreaded her emotional demanding.  But he did not know it—­he did not know what was the matter at all.  He simply knew vaguely that he was a brute, that he felt like a brute, and that he did not know how to stop being a brute.  His wife knew that he was a brute, and at the same time she felt throughly convinced that she was a suffering martyr.  He was dreading to come home and she was dreading to have him come home—­and there they were in a continuous nightmare.  Now they have left the nightmare far, far behind, and each one knows that the other has one good friend in the world in whom he or she can feel entire confidence, and their friendship is growing stronger and clearer and more normal every day.