Tea-table Talk | Page 3

could not do the sort of things she wanted him to do; she was so romantic. He did try. He used to go to all the poetical plays and study them. But he hadn't the knack of it and he was naturally clumsy. He would rush into the room and fling himself on his knees before her, never noticing the dog, so that, instead of pouring out his heart as he had intended, he would have to start off with, 'So awfully sorry! Hope I haven't hurt the little beast?' Which was enough to put anybody out."
"Young girls are so foolish," said the Old Maid; "they run after what glitters, and do not see the gold until it is too late. At first they are all eyes and no heart."
"I knew a girl," I said, "or, rather, a young married woman, who was cured of folly by the homoeopathic method. Her great trouble was that her husband had ceased to be her lover."
"It seems to me so sad," said the Old Maid. "Sometimes it is the woman's fault, sometimes the man's; more often both. The little courtesies, the fond words, the tender nothings that mean so much to those that love--it would cost so little not to forget them, and they would make life so much more beautiful."
"There is a line of common sense running through all things," I replied; "the secret of life consists in not diverging far from it on either side. He had been the most devoted wooer, never happy out of her eyes; but before they had been married a year she found to her astonishment that he could be content even away from her skirts, that he actually took pains to render himself agreeable to other women. He would spend whole afternoons at his club, slip out for a walk occasionally by himself, shut himself up now and again in his study. It went so far that one day he expressed a distinct desire to leave her for a week and go a-fishing with some other men. She never complained--at least, not to him."
"That is where she was foolish," said the Girton Girl. "Silence in such cases is a mistake. The other party does not know what is the matter with you, and you yourself--your temper bottled up within-- become more disagreeable every day."
"She confided her trouble to a friend," I explained.
"I so dislike people who do that," said the Woman of the World. "Emily never would speak to George; she would come and complain about him to me, as if I were responsible for him: I wasn't even his mother. When she had finished, George would come along, and I had to listen to the whole thing over again from his point of view. I got so tired of it at last that I determined to stop it."
"How did you succeed?" asked the Old Maid, who appeared to be interested in the recipe.
"I knew George was coming one afternoon," explained the Woman of the World, "so I persuaded Emily to wait in the conservatory. She thought I was going to give him good advice; instead of that I sympathised with him and encouraged him to speak his mind freely, which he did. It made her so mad that she came out and told him what she thought of him. I left them at it. They were both of them the better for it; and so was I."
"In my case," I said, "it came about differently. Her friend explained to him just what was happening. She pointed out to him how his neglect and indifference were slowly alienating his wife's affections from him. He argued the subject.
"'But a lover and a husband are not the same,' he contended; 'the situation is entirely different. You run after somebody you want to overtake; but when you have caught him up, you settle down quietly and walk beside him; you don't continue shouting and waving your handkerchief after you have gained him.'
"Their mutual friend presented the problem differently."
"'You must hold what you have won,' she said, 'or it will slip away from you. By a certain course of conduct and behaviour you gained a sweet girl's regard; show yourself other than you were, how can you expect her to think the same of you?'
"'You mean,' he inquired, 'that I should talk and act as her husband exactly as I did when her lover?'
"'Precisely,' said the friend 'why not?'
"'It seems to me a mistake,' he grumbled.
"'Try it and see,' said the friend.
"'All right,' he said, 'I will.' And he went straight home and set to work."
"Was it too late," asked the Old Maid, "or did they come together again?"
"For the next mouth," I answered, "they were together twenty-four hours of the day. And then it was the wife who