Art is a hard mistress, and there is no art quite so hard as that of being a wife.
So many women exhaust their artistic power in getting married, which is, after all, a comparatively easy business. It takes a perfect artist to remain married – married in the perfect sense of the term; but most of us have to be content to muddle through.
Imagine a girl called upon without a single lesson to produce a tune – a lot of tunes – in fact, one never-ending succession of harmonies – from the most difficult instrument in the world. Note that the instrument not only gets grumpy in cold weather and skittish in the spring – not only slacks or breaks its strings with every change of temperature – but becomes tempestuous over a tight shoe, broody over an out-of-date egg, and cross, sulky, or mirthful for reasons that no sane woman can understand.
That is what the average wife has to reckon with; and if she intends to play the game – humiliating as some may think it – HE will loom largely on the horizon all her life.
I hope she may find it worthwhile to take a few hints from an old hand.
BLANCHE EBBUTT.