Carrying out the idea of co-partnership, should your wife exceed her allowance, running herself, and consequently you, into debt, meet the exigency as you would a similar indiscretion on the part of a young and inexperienced member of your firm. Treat the extravagance as a mistake, not a fault. Not one girl-wife in one hundred, who has not been a wage-earner, has had any experience in the management of finances. The father gives the daughter money when she (or her mother) tells him that she needs it, or would like to have it. When it is gone he is applied to for more. She has been a beneficiary all her life, usually an irresponsible, thoughtless recipient of what is lavished or doled out to her, according to the parental whim and means.
Teach her business methods, tactfully, yet decidedly.
One young wife I wot of began keeping the expense-book, presented to her by her husband, with these entries:
“_January fourth._ Received $75.00 (Seventy-five dollars).
“_January sixth._ Spent $70.25 shopping, etc.
“Balance—$4.75 set down to Profit and Loss.”
After fifteen years of married life her husband died, bequeathing the whole of a large estate to her, and making her sole guardian of their three children,—a confidence fully justified by her conduct of the affairs thus committed to her.
“My husband trained me patiently and thoroughly,” she said to one who complimented her financial sagacity. “I was an ignoramus when we were married.”
Then, laughingly, she related the “profit and loss” incident.
It is the fashion to sneer at women’s business methods. Who are to blame for their blunders?
Should your wife play with her allowance, as a child with a new toy, let censure fall upon those who have kept her in leading-strings. Teach her gradually to comprehend her responsibilities. The sense of them will steady her unless she be exceptionally feather-brained. Be she wasteful or frugal, the allowance you have made to her is as honestly hers to have, to hold or to spend, as the third of your estate which the law will give her in the event of your death.
“Settlements,” according to the English sense of the word, are not yet common in the United States. One American father, whose daughter was on the eve of marriage with an Englishman, ordered the prospective bridegroom out of the house when the foreigner queried innocently as to the “settlements” the future father-in-law intended to make upon his child.