Rambles in Womanland Part 22

The poor man feels he is beaten, that he is a brute, and he says nothing more, until one night when it is time to retire, he prepares a surprise for his wife.

'What's all this?' exclaims the wife when she realizes what has happened.

'Nothing, dear,' he replies. 'To tell you the truth, I go hunting to-morrow morning, and I shall have to rise very early. My hunting-boots are new, and in the morning my feet are always a little swollen, so I keep them on to save trouble. You must excuse my spurs, too, dear, but I prefer these, which are fastened to the boots. I shall be most comfortable to-morrow.'

CHAPTER XII

THE IDEAL HUSBAND

There are qualities which most women admire in men, and there are qualities which practically every man admires in all women; but if you were to ask of a hundred men, 'What is the ideal wife?' and of a hundred women, 'What is the ideal husband?' you would get a hundred opinions all different one from the other.

_Quot capita, tot sensus_, which, in the case of women, I should like to translate, 'So many pretty heads, so many different opinions.' This, however, is as it should be. Only there remains that terrible problem for every man and woman to solve: Find your ideal if you can, and when you think you have found it, see that you are not disappointed.

I have of late interviewed a good many Parisiennes on the subject, and I will give some of the answers which I have received.

One said to me: 'The ideal husband is the one who devotes his life to his wife, who makes her the first consideration in all his thoughts and acts, who understands that she is the aim of everything which he undertakes, and that he should use all the resources that Nature has placed in his mind and Fortune has put in his hands in order that she may be happy and remain long beautiful.'

I need not say that this was the opinion of a young girl who had only just made her debut in society. Nor do I need say that the following came from the lips of a married woman--one, however, whom I guarantee to be in the possession of all the womanly virtues likely to make a husband most satisfied with his lot.

'The ideal husband,' she said, 'is the one who lets his wife alone, who does not interfere with her household duties or any of her little womanly fads, who is not always paying her compliments or besieging her with advice, and who is not always by her side or behind her back, who seldom addresses her reproaches, and never reminds her of what he has done to deserve her grat.i.tude, who is not fussy, fidgety, or a bore of a model of propriety and virtue.

'When I was a young girl I dreamed of matrimony as a sweet state of slavery. Now I shout for liberty--liberty for him and liberty for me. I do not mean to say, of course, that man and wife should live apart and not care one what the other does. No, no; but I firmly believe that we should remain at a respectful distance from the objects which we want to see to advantage and admire.

'A woman should never allow even the most loving and beloved of husbands to be constantly making love to her. One may suffer from abundance of wealth. A great deal of discretion and a certain amount of respect between married people are sure to secure the duration and the solidity of their affection. Those who live at too close quarters are sure to part one day or the other.'

Here is another, with less philosophy, but a good deal of what I might call paradoxical psychology:

'The ideal husband,' said to me a woman married to a French painter on the road to celebrity, 'is the one who is not a man of genius. Nothing monopolizes a man like a great talent for writing, painting, or even business; he belongs to his muse, his art, or his figures. His thoughts are absorbed, and he has very few, if any, left for the little creature who lives with him, not in the clouds, but by his side on this earth.

'When he returns from his dreams, he throws at her--poor inferior being!--a glance of pity, if not of contempt. My ideal husband is a man who can live for me as I am ready to live for him, and who can do without a mistress, whether that mistress be called Literature, Art, or Commerce. I love great men, great poets, great painters or sculptors, but I would not have a great man for a husband; nay, furthermore, I should like to have a husband jealous of all the great men of my predilection in the world of fiction.'

A piquant little woman, not a bit beautiful, but absolutely charming and the embodiment of amiability and cheerfulness, said to me:

'The ideal husband shall not be a handsome man, but a gentlemanly one, with a keen sense of humour, cheerful, a laughing philosopher, and a man with a magnanimous turn of mind, who would never take advantage of a little trouble in which I might find myself entangled to say to me, "I told you so," but get me out of it quickly.'

Of course, all my fair friends, without exception, have insisted on the ideal husband being indulgent, generous, manly, sincere, loyal, and above middle height. Strange to say that none of them ask him to be handsome, much less insist on it. One of them even went so far as to say:

'A husband should not be handsome. First of all he is never very beautiful, since he is a man. But he might be worse; he might think he is beautiful, and then Heaven help his wife!'

'The ideal husband,' remarked a lady, 'is a man who should never be ridiculous, never make a fool of himself, and never for a moment believe that women took notice of him. A woman's love may survive any defect in her husband, but ridicule never.'

The fact is that words or acts of a man ridiculous enough to make his wife wish she were a mile deep under the floor will lower him so much in her estimation that she will never be able to look up to him again; and no woman has ever been known to drop her love--she sends it up always. I will conclude with the opinion of an American lady:

'The ideal husband should never part with any of his most refined manners in his home, where he should endeavour ever to appear at his best, in dress, language, and behaviour, in the presence of his wife, who is his queen.'

I expected as much from her supreme and magnificent majesty, Mrs.

Jonathan, Queen of the United States.

CHAPTER XIII

MARRYING ABOVE OR BELOW ONE'S STATION

It is said in England that, of all men who occupy high positions in professional life, judges are those who oftenest marry below their station.

Many are even said to have married impossible women, and on these women many amusing stories are related in the smoke-rooms of London clubs--stories which, I have no doubt, are of the _se non e vero, e ben trovato_ type, and as faithful to truth as the stories that are told on the feet of the Chicago women or the intellect of the Boston girls.

CHORUS-GIRL MARRIAGES

However, it must be admitted that fools are not the only men who marry women that are greatly inferior to them in manner, education, and social standing; the cleverest men and the most aristocratic ones have often been known to do the same.

Dukes, marquises, and earls have married chorus-girls and shop-girls; great literary men and artists have married uneducated girls, and have led very happy lives with them. Of course, I pa.s.s over the aristocracy who marry among the common people in order to get their coats of arms out of p.a.w.n. If they are poor and marry rich girls, you can hardly call this a case of _mesalliance_, since the superiority of birth in the man is compensated by the superiority of fortune in the woman.

Of course, _mesalliances_ appeal to people, because they always suggest marriages for love, and novelists of all countries have worked this theme for all it is worth. In real life they very seldom work well, for the simple reason that matrimony places a man and a woman on absolutely equal footing, and that happiness for them, in the case of a _mesalliance_, is only possible on condition that one goes up to the level of the superior, or the other comes down to the level of the inferior.

EDUCATING ONE'S WIFE

Marriages that have the greatest chances of success are those in which the two partners bring the same amount of capital in social position, in education, in fortune, in character, and I will even add in stature and in physical beauty, with perhaps a slight--a very slight--superiority to the credit of the man in all these conditions, except that of beauty, which is an attribute that woman can possess in any degree without making the happiness of her husband and herself run any risk.

Mrs. Hodgson Burnett, in one of her novels, makes a barrister fall in love with a girl who works in the coal-mines of Lancaster (another case of the legal profession going wrong). The man has the girl sent to school to learn manners and get educated, then marries her, and all is smooth ever after.

I have heard of this being done in real life with less success. The behaviour of the man in a case like this should create grat.i.tude in the heart of the woman, and grat.i.tude does not engender love. On the contrary, Cupid is a little fellow so fond of his liberty and so wilful that anything that tends to influence him--worse than that, to force him--has on him the contrary effect to that which should be expected.

Yet, I say, it is the only way to bring an uneducated woman to the level of an educated man--before matrimony. After marriage the woman is acknowledged, proclaimed the equal of her husband, and she will stand no hint as to her being inferior to her husband in any way.

If she loves him and is not conceited, any act on his part, however kindly performed, that would suggest to her that she might improve herself in language, behaviour, etc., would cause her unhappiness and even pangs of anguish.

If, on the other hand, she did not love him and was conceited, or even only of an independent character, she would soon give him a piece of her mind on the subject of her improvements, and let him hear the great typical phrase of democracy, 'I'm as good as you.'

DANGEROUS EXPERIMENTS

No, no; he must put up with the situation, and make the best of it. In that case men console themselves with the thought that their wives are pretty, or that they are good housekeepers, good cooks. After all, a man gets married to please himself, not for what the world has to say of his wife.

Still, you have to succeed in the world, and if you despise the opinion of the world the world turns its back on you. And you must remember this: however big you are, or you think you are, the earth can go on running its course round the sun without your help.

French and American women have a keen power of observation and native adaptability. Better than any other women in the world, they can soon adapt themselves to new surroundings and new ways, and learn how to talk, walk, dress, and behave like the leading women of any new social circles they may have entered. Witness the American women that are to be seen at the courts of Europe.

However, the experiment of a _mesalliance_ is always a dangerous one to make. Nine times out of ten the rabbit will always taste of the cabbage it was brought up on.