The fact is, that many men are more kind to everybody else's wives
than to their own wives. They will let the wife carry a heavy coal
scuttle upstairs, and will at one bound clear the width of a parlor to
pick up some other lady's pocket-handkerchief. There is an evil which
I have seen under the sun, and it is common among men--namely,
husbands in flirtation. The attention they ought to put upon their own
wives they bestow upon others. They smile on them coyly and askance,
and with a manner that seems to say: "I wish I was free from that old
drudge at home. What an improvement you would be on my present
surroundings!" And bouquets are sent, and accidental meetings take
place, and late at night the man comes to his prosaic home, whistling
and hilarious, and wonders that the wife is jealous. There are
thousands of men who, while not positively immoral, need radical
correction of their habits in this direction. It is meanness
immeasurable for a man by his behavior to seem to say to his wife:
"You can't help yourself, and I will go where I please, and admire
whom I please, and I defy your criticism."
Why did you not have that put in the bond, O domestic Shylock? Why did
you not have it understood before you were pronounced husband and wife
that she should have only a part of the dividend of your affections;
that when, as time rolled on and the cares of life had erased some of
the bright lines from her face, and given unwieldiness to her form,
you would have the reserved right to pay obeisance to cheeks more
rubicund, and figure lither and more agile, and as you demanded the
last pound of patience and endurance on her part you could, with the
emphasis of an Edwin Forrest or a Macready, have tapped the eccentric
marriage document and have said: "It's in the bond!" If this modern
Rebekah had understood beforehand where she was alighting she would
have ordered the camel drivers to turn the caravan backward toward
Padan-aram. Flirtation has its origin either in dishonesty or
licentiousness. The married man who indulges in it is either a fraud
or a rake. However high up in society such a one may be, and however
sought after, I would not give a three-cent piece, though it had been
three times clipped, for the virtue of the masculine flirt.