THE IDEAL HUSBAND.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XV, Issue IV, 27 July 1895, Page 90

THE IDEAL HUSBAND.

Mrs Crawford (the Paris correspondent of the Daily Netos) contributes an article on * The Ideal Husband ’ to ‘ The Young Woman.’ She says :—‘ Ideals of husbands are, it seems to me, less often borrowed from novels than they used to be in our grandmothers' and mothers' days. Is the cause to be found in the widened sphere of thought and action of the girl or young woman ? Is it that she judges for herself instead of going to some romance writer who observed his subjects for low characters, but drew from the depths of his own moral consciousness the lordly and the epic types ? The girl who works hard for eight hours a day as a letter-sorter, a telegraphic operator, a shop assistant, a flower gardener, or who sweats her brain to win university degrees, has not time to dream of mythological ladykillers who have issued fully armed from the novelist’s brain. The modern ‘'character sketch” may have helped to crowd out the hero of the novel. It can be taken in during a hurried run by the Underground from the home to the post offices where the girl sorter or operator works. A character sketch written by a thoughtful and observant writer is about one of the best wattles to support the tendrilled and clinging vegetation of feminine fancy. In our grandmothers’ time thousands of young girls were off their heads about a Fergus Maclvor, a Ravenswood, a De Wilton, a Byron’s Corsair. The ideal was snobbish. Nobody felt sorry that she had not been the guardian angel of Robinson Crusoe in his desert island, or that she had not been the servant girl in whom Pastor Oberlin had found in his obscure but sublime work a fellow spirit and a helpmate and helpmeet. Let us hope to see the day when most women will think it better to go with a Livingstone into the wilderness than to share the throne of the greatest Emperor. However, before setting one’s face desertwise, one should use all one’s faculties of discernment to make sure that the man asking one to share his fate is of the kind who grows great in the school of constantly shifting adversity. If he have not'the backbone of a strong moral nature and do not possess his soul in patience, he is well-nigh sure to prove a broken reed. ’