AN EDITOR’S WIFE

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1506, 10 January 1901, Page 26

AN EDITOR’S WIFE

The girl who marries an editor should possess her soul in patience, and, like the lady in the Proverbs, find her comfort in “looking well to the ways of her household. She must not, like Blanche Amory, require de grandes emotions, or have a stormy soul; for these things demand the attentions of a thoroughly unpreoccupied husband. She must not be vain of her accomplishments, for her husband will think nothing of going to sleep during her most masterly efforts at Mozart or Chopin. She will gradually accustom herself to regard her music in the humbler light of a soothing soporific—a salve for her editorial martyr, just returned to her from the rack of office work—the crushing Juggernaut of politics. She must not' rebel if, like the husband in “■Elizabeth/s German Garden/-’ he fail “to speak a single whole sentence in three weeks/" and she must expect but few endearments and relaxations. An editor does not, as a rule, bring his wife home enticing parcels from Fuller's, or bouquets from Co vent Garden. His wife must endure his absence for at least thirteen hours out of the twenty-four, and must tolerate the fact that his meals, his waking and sleeping hours, are all extraordinary and irregular. When he comes back to dinner an hour late owing to the stray call of some belated lunatic at the office, she must bear, unmurmuring, complaints of the overcooked dinner. She must resign herself to the sad fact that her husband has barely time to notice her or her toilettesshe may even wear the . same dress for six months, and if there happened to be a strike on, or a colonial war, or even a new Budget, it will matter little, for his eyes are fixed, so to speak, on Boi*rioboola Gha all through three courses and a dessert. Like Trollope’s hero of “The Three Clerks, “His heart is in his office; his heart is always there/’ and his wife only gets the reversion of his mind. His whole attention is never yours, for even when you are doing vour best to entertain him-in your poor way, his brow- will be corrugated by an impending libel case, or a new linotype, or txventy million things. There is, however, one exception to this rule. If he comes in at half-past three in the morning, filled with woe and the prospect of a European war, his wife must be ready to soothe and sympathise. “My dear/’ an editor’s wife of some thirty years’ experience said to me, has told me all I know of politics when he came home in the early dawn and the sparrows were twittering.” Poor woman ! What dismal associations those sparrows must always have had for her! The editorial husband is, as a rule, less communicative by day; for if his wife then venture a political question, he will probably crush her by remarking, “Why don’t you ever read your paper ? it comes every morning.” The girl destined to be the wife of an editor should not be afraid of burglars, for it will be her sad fate to keep the front door unbolted till her spouse lets himself gently in at unearthly hours with his latch-key. If socially inclined, she must early make up her mind to go everywhere alone—or else to stay at home. T ' she and her husband do, by any strange chance go out to dinner, she never sees him after they once sit down, for he goes on to the office, and she must return alone—with the latch-key, eighteenpence tied up in the comer of her handkerchief, and maybe a kicking hansom horse and a tipsy driver —to her lonely abode. It may be said, in some extenuation of the editor’s many grievances, that, s_p far as he is concerned, he occupies, so to epeak, a throne, far above his fellow-men. . . . The girl who marries an editor must either be remarkably thick-skinned, or else be firmly resolved to live her own life and have only her own friends. she must resolve sternly to ignore the crushing responsibilities of office, which offer, bo far as she is concerned, no compensations. She must be a world unto herself, capable of endqjring much solitude—even of enjoying her life in a kind of lonely ahd enchanted palace, to which her mysterious and fairy.prince only returns with a latchkey jn the dark. —''Woman at Home.”