_Think_, you, her husband, how little a kind word, a smile, a caress to _you_, how much to _her_. If you call these things "childish" and "beneath your notice," then you should never have married. There are men who should remain forever single. You are one. You have no right to require of a woman her health, strength, time and devotion, to mock her with this shadowy, unsatisfying return. A new bonnet, a dress, a shawl, a watch, anything, everything but what a _true_ woman's heart most craves--sympathy, appreciation, love. She may be rich in everything else; but if she be poor in these, and is a _good_ woman, she had better die.
There are hard, unloving, cold monstrosities of women, (rare exceptions,) who neither require love, nor know how to give it. We are not speaking of these. That big-hearted, loving, noble men have occasionally been thrown away upon such, does not disprove what we have been saying. But even a man thus situated has greatly the advantage of a woman in a similar position, because, over the needle a woman may think herself into an Insane Asylum, while the active, out-door turmoil of business life is at least a _sometime_ reprieve to _him_.
Do you ask me, "Are there no happy wives?" God be praised, yes, and glorious, lovable husbands, too, who know how to treat a woman, and would have her neither fool nor drudge. Almost every wife would be a good and happy wife, _were she only loved enough_. Let husbands, present and prospective, think of this.
"Now, I am a clerk, with eight hundred dollars salary, and yet my wife expects me to dress her in first-class style. What would you advise me to do--leave her?"
These words I unintentionally overheard in a public conveyance. I went home, pondering them over. "Leave her!" Were _you_ not to blame, sir, in selecting a foolish, frivolous wife, and expecting her to confine her desires, as a sensible woman ought, and would, within the limits of your small salary? Have _you, yourself_, no "first-class" expenses, in the way of rides, drinks and cigars, which it might be well for you to consider while talking to her of retrenchment? Did it ever occur to you, that under all that frivolity, which you admired in the maid, but deplore and condemn in the wife, there may be, after all, enough of the true woman, to appreciate and sympathize with a _kind, loving_ statement of the case, in its parental as well as marital relations? Did it ever occur to you, that if you require no more from _her_, in the way of self-denial, than you are willing to endure _yourself_--in short, if you were _just_ in this matter, as all husbands are _not_--it might bring a pair of loving arms about your neck, that would be a talisman amid future toil, and a pledge of co-operation in it, that would give wings to effort? And should it not be so immediately--should you encounter tears and frowns--would you not do well to remember the hundreds of wives of drunken husbands, who, through the length and breadth of the land, are thinking--_not_ of "_leaving_" them, but how, day by day, they shall more patiently bear their burden, toiling with their own feeble hands, in a woman's restricted sphere of effort, to make up their deficiencies, closing their ears resolutely to any recital of a husband's failings, nor asking advice of aught save their own faithful, wifely hearts, "_what course they shall pursue_?"