AS SEEN THROUGH WOMAN’S EYES.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXIII, Issue XVII, 22 October 1904, Page 62

AS SEEN THROUGH WOMAN’S EYES.

At What Age Should a Girl Marry? By LADY JEUNE, the Celebrated English Writer. Tile question as to whether it is best for a woman to marry early, <>» after she has had some experience of life, is one which possibly no one is prepared to answer. It is one on which no definite conclusion can be arrived at, for so much depends on circumstances, temperament and health, to say nothing of many minor contingencies. Formerly girls married earlier than now—before they were twenty years of age, often when just out of the schoolroom. But that was before the gospel of woman’s emancipation became an article of faith to which every woman thinks it necessary to subscribe. In those days girls looked on marriage as the only aim and object of life. The restrictions of home were so severe that marriage was welcomed as a deliverance and as the beginning of an exist-

dice in which a woman found play 101 her individuality, and in which, though with recognised limitations, she found some scope for the exercise of her tastes and ambitions. The tranquility of girlhood was a good preparation for the larger life; women then were strong, patient and content with lives much less full of incident and possibilities than they are to-day. The life of a girl before she came out was a calmer, more uneventful one than to-day, when girls are so highly educated and overwrought that their 'nervous systems are tried severely before they go into the world and enter on what is to every one a life full of excitement and nervous pressure. It is not contended that women were stronger then than now—physically they were probably less robust—but the tranquility of their early life, with its wholesome monotony, was a much healthier preparation for their future. The field of choice was more limited than now. the possibilities of communication were less, girls saw but few men, and family reasons, family pressure and the desirability of marriage played an important part in a girl’s selection of a husband. All these considerations, added to the desire of a girl for an individual life and liberation from family control, made women marry earlier than they do in these days.

Whether it is better that women should marry early or not is a matter of opinion. To a woman of a clinging, gentle nature an early marriage is everything. She has her mind, her opinions, shaped for her, and on that she moulds her life. She takes the line on which her future is to be made in an unquestioning spirit, and the duties of her life, the lives of her children, all come naturally and easy to her as a part of a future which has been prepared for her by some one else, and about whose fashioning she has had no opinion of her own. Women are very

adaptive, and fall into a position with surprising readiness; and to many of them the idea of possibility of another mode of life never occurs. They pursue the even tenor of their way perfectly happy, and please every one they come in contact with. To such a nature this life is ideal, and there is no disturbing suspicion of a wider life with absorbing problems and larger interests, in which other women find work and interests outside the domain of home. Possibly, when the sun of life burns less warmly and the shades of the evening fall, such a woman has had the best that is to be got out of life, free from the restless and unsatisfied desires which torment other women less calm and less philosophical than herself. ft is only natural, with the training and education of women in these days, that they should postpone as long as they can marrying and giving up a life of freedom and pleasure for the responsibilities and restrictions of marriage, for it is no exaggeration to say that, as formerly marriage gave women independence, it is now really the first moment in which they have to reckon with another life, another career, and one in which they have a share of responsibilities from which they' cannot escape. For some positions and with some temperaments the experience a girl gains byseeing something of the world and learning to make up her mind and form her opinion is invaluable. A woman can be more of a companion and help to her husband and can enter into the interests of his life with a wider knowledge and more experience than a young girl. Whether the training has made her more sympathetic, more intuitively helpful, is doubtful, but she is doubtless better equipped in judgment and knowledge of the world. A girl who marries later in life has also the advantage of making friends which a younger woman cannot do. The centre of a woman’s life changes, and the interests and responsibilities of marriage cut her oil' from the society of other women, so that she loses a good deal of the friendship and camraderie which exist amonggirls to-day.

The women who were content to live mainly in the country, with its simple tastes and occupations, willing to accept its monotony and asking for no other life, hardly exist to-day. In their place we have the strong, self-reliant, capable girl, able to hold her own in many of the pursuits of man, and able to accept his love, not as a woman only, but as his equal —his friend and companion, not his servant. Perhaps such a woman fits better into the life of to-day, when what is wanted are women who can stand alone and face the world without the help of any one. There are marriages for love, even in these days, when a girl of seventeen wins the love of the man of her heart. But for most girls, for whom the idyllic life is still possible, and now that life has lost so many of its illusions, it is afterall such a matter-of-fact affair that

perhaps it is better for them not to marry till they have mastered at least some if its problems.

Things a Wife Should Not Tell Her Husband. If you want to hold your husband, keep right on telling him the things that drive him away from you. If, in the course of married events, he comes to discover that there is more than one interesting woman in the world, proceed at once to show him that you resent it. Proceed promptly and emphatically to assert your rights of proprietorship. Tell him that he is yours only; that he is neither hers nor theirs, nor even his own any more, but yours—all that he is, and all that lie may come to be, for ever and for ever. His emotions, which he pledged from that day forward through every change of condition, should remain the same; his desires and inclinations he must curb and direct in fidelity to that pledge; his convictions, religious and social, which you oppose, and which he confesses only at the peril of his domestic peace; his individuality, which your tyranny represses, and his genius, which it pitilessly cripples—all are yours. His own never again. Xeither his time, for which he must render account to you for deeds done in the body; his

business, for which in all matters your head is better than his; his personal letters, which you have the bad taste to open and read; his friends, which your jealousy and bad manners alienate from him; nor the confidences of his clients, which you make yours unlawfully through the keyhole. Tell him these things with your eye on the clock when you make him promise he won’t stay out later than nine. With your eye on him, as if to add a breath of intellectual refreshment to his domestic life, he sits just without hearing distance of you and his mother-in-law, conversing with Mildred Bayard on the Chinese question. And by all means tell them to him when you get him alone in your chamber, as you put your hair back into its curlers and remark that while Mildred Bayard has a prety face, she is getting herself dreadfully talked about for being so forward with the married men.

Tell them to him, too, with a withering glance across the punch-bowl, which will warn him that if to a certain woman dangerously near by, talking to five interested men at the same time, he behaves with the manners that bear the most distant relation to those of a gentleman, he does so on penalty of the sorriest nagging he ever had in his life—at which all the men in the room feel so sorry for him they hardly know what to do. Tell him by curtain lectures, sulking, scolding, watering, and all the infernal meth-

oda of henpecking inspired by the furious passion of jealousy. Wake him up in the middle of the night to tell him it will set him to thinking, and lead him to ponder the wisdom of marriage, hying there all the rest of the long, tedious night, staring in wide-awake desperation into the darkness, he will catch himself wondering in the spirit of the sceptic whether the Lord spake from experience or only theory when He instructed that it was not good for man to be alone. And by the time you have reached the other end of the honeymoon, if you have not destroyed every atom of your charm for your husband and turned his love into tolerance or hate, then you are still possible, and marriage is worth while. Never yet did man fall in love with woman from duty. Never will duty keep him in love with her. Love is a thing spontaneous, which reason and conscience and will are as powerless to retain as to create, and which force and fear only destroy. The moment the wife begins to remind her husband of the duties of his heart and his pledges she strikes the first blow to her charm and power, and makes marriage a bondage.

To conceal your real feelings from one end of marriage to the other assume make believe ones; to become a mere machine, making a farce of the sweetest and holiest of human emotions, may be, it is true, a crucifixion of the soul and sense alike which no vow or responsibility under heaven can persuade you it is your duty to endure. This is a delicate question of individual conscience which nobody presumes to settle for you. But if you do go on regardless, repulsing your husband’s caress and chilling his affection, you will feel no surprise, of course, when you find him seeking the love and happiness he longs for in the heart of some other woman. And, being a fair-minded woman, and first of all and always a woman of taste, you will not add selfishness and stupidity to injustice and vulgarity by exposing him through the court and press. You will consider, instead, just how much your own actions had to do with bringing the matter about. You will think of the things you would do so differently if only you might do them over again; of the smiles and tenderness you would give in place of the cold unsympathy and unamiable aversions. Looking back upon all that deadly repulsion, with its inevitable disappointments and estrangements, you will be very loth to punish and very slow to blame.

If you have been on the verge of an elopement; if you are recovering from a recent infatuation, or if you are suffering the pangs of remorse for any kind of indiscretion, never confide it to your husband. The idea is a pretty one, but no matter what the folly or how deep your contrition, never tell him. Simply keep out of temptation and do not do it again. A husband's liberality in the matter of forgiveness for his own digressions is no guarantee of his generosity in regard to those of his wife. 1 cannot recommend the candour of the

husband of whom Dr. Lyman Abbott told us one Sunday, who confessed to his wife that he and another woman were in love with each other. Their relation, he said, was innocent of wrong-doing; and in consideration of his wife’s distressing jealousy had ceased. W hat, then, was to be gained by admission that could only pain her the more, and which drove her to the extremity of applying to strangers for marital advice? Tell your husbands nothing that will cause them to feel the weariness of their bonds, or by the lightest Heck of doubt mar their idealisation of you. o o o o o

Should Married Folk Take Separate Holidays ?

(The writer of this article thinks they would be a remedy for the irritation and discord which break out now and again between the best-regulated husbands and wives.) “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” is an old adage; but whether it is true or not depends on circumstances. Some husbands and wives care for one another merely from habit. They grow used to each other’s ways. Beyond this there may be very .ittle love to link the two togetner. Nevertheless, many a wife whose husband is called away from business for a few days regards his absence as a holiday. Husbands often rejoice secretly when the wife goes on a long-promised visit to Aunt Ann.

The truth is that living together for 365 days of the year is apt to become tiresome.

Therefore a good many married couples always arrange to spend their holidays separately. The wife takes the family tc the seaside, while her lord and master goes off on a yachting cruise. Sometimes on these excursions he does not mention the wife at home, plays the part of a cavalier to sundry pretty ladies of the same party, and has a real good time.

But the wife at home, who takes her young brood to farm or sea, does not get much of the fun of the fair. She takes with her the necessity to feed tier flock, housekeep, and superintend the domestic arrangements—no holiday to her, for she does all these things year in year out.

If the separate holidays system is adopted at all, the wife ought to have a little holiday on her own in addit’on to the cnildren’s sea-dipping and sand frolics—which, they all agree, would be poor fun without mother.

A woman, however devoted to husband and children, needs periods when she is off domestic duty—just two or three weeks in the year when somebody else has to worry about what

there shall be for dinner —just a short space when she sits down to a meal and is in joyous ignorance of what the next course will bring forth. Now, there is no doubt that some types of men weary of a woman who is always there. It grows monotonous to sit with the same person unvaryingly during a steady 1095 or more meals in the year.

He values her all the more if she is tactful enough to go away for a few days now and then and leave him to face the vacant place at the table and by the fireside of an evening. At first he enjoys his emancipation; it brings back the freedom of bachelor days. Presently—so strong is the force of habit in a man —he begins to miss the very monotony of having his wife with him. We all know the fresh interest we take in any member of one’s family who has been away from home. They come back brighter and better-looking, with a fresh stock of things to talk about, full of news and the charm of noveltv.

There are times when people who live together need a holiday from each other. Little things begin to jar; we get on one another’s nerves. Irritations accumulate; we want a little let-up or reprieve from their constant propinquity. Everybody is familiar with the fits of distemper wh’eh break out every now and again between the best-regulated husbands and wives. Separation for a space is a sovereign remedy.

If a couple have not been getting on very well lately, let them go for a holiday apart. When he goes his way and she hers—rejoicing more or less—for two or three weeks, the change of scene and environment will help to soothe over the irritation and discord which has grown up between them. Barriers and coldnesses fiVquently break down best by a wise absence. Each comes back with the good intention of turning over a new leaf. Both are refreshed by the new scenes and people they have been amongst. Their minds are full of fresh thoughts. They don’t want to harp everlastingly on that one string which caused each so much sorrow before they went on their separate holidays. “If marriage were for six months only out of every year,” remarked the old bachelor, “there would be no Divorce Court and no separation orders.” It sounds cynical, but a great deal of solid truth lies beneath. Monotony kills—it kills happiness, it massacres romance.

The deadly sameness of the days leads some people to a kind of numb despair. They don’t care what happens so long as something does. So they quarrel

for excitement; they must have some incidents in their lives, even though they are unhappy ones. The happiest marriages, no doubt, are those where the husband’s business calls him away from home periodically not for very prolonged absences, be cause he is likely then not to form a deep home habit; but for short spaces, when he and his wife may get a little freedom and the breathing space from the boredom which is apt to come from being always together. W hen a man’s work calls him from home, he and his wife should take their holidays to get her.

Otherwise, a very fair percentage would be all the happier for taking them apart. In all hotels and boardinghouses in the holiday season there are only too many married couples who snap one another up, and jangle and spo I each other’s vacation. They need the absence cure. Through being together 365 days of the year they have got on one another’s nerves. At heart they really care, and are often most affectionate deep down. The irritation is only on the surface, and arises from a surfeit of one another’s society. A separate holiday is a sure cure. The Dorcas-like woman who sticks I ke grim death to her fireside and her home duties, never taking a holiday apart, often bores husband—and herself—to extinction. Iler wiser sister, who knows the value of absence, betakes her to friends for an occasional holiday jaunt. If thei” is some uiscomfort at home, so much the better. She will be immensely valued on her return. All home duty and no play makes the mother and wife not only n dull, but a very unappreciated person by those in whose service she slaves.