sit down quietly and study yourself and try to find out what nature
intended you to be.
Probably you have no very decided talent, no cosmic urge that makes you
feel that you must paint, or sing, or dance, or cook, or keep books, or
else life will be dust and ashes in your mouth.
But you are sure to find that there is something that you like to do
better than other things. It may be trimming hats. It may be messing
around the kitchen. It may be that you are quick at figures and can
always remember dates. It may be that you write a good hand, or always
got a hundred in spelling at school.
There is always some one thing for which you have a turn, as the phrase
goes, and that points the road for you to follow.
If you have no mechanical skill, don’t do anything that requires
deftness of the hands. If you can’t spell, don’t waste any time trying
to be a stenographer. If you cannot add up a column of figures three
times without getting four different results, pass up bookkeeping. You
will never make a success of anything for which you have no aptitude.
You will always hate it and be bored by it.
The successful people are those who love their work so well that it
is a sheer joy to do it; who never count the labor that they put into
it, and who are so interested in it that it is perpetually in their
thoughts.
Therefore choose the thing that you like to do and get fun out of
doing, and don’t just blunder into taking the first job that presents
itself or make the mistake of taking up some profession to which you
are not called because some other girls are doing so or because it
seems to you romantic or elegant.
Of course, in these days of the emancipation of women, every road is
as free for a girl to follow as it is to a boy, but you will find that
those women make the greatest successes who stick to purely feminine
lines. There is just as much need for woman’s work in the world as
there is for man’s, and when it is equally well done it is equally well
paid. In some occupations it is a little better paid because there are
fewer women experts than there are men.
There are very few women who have risen from the ranks to become
presidents of banks, or trust magnates, or big manufacturers; but every
community has in it women who have made tidy fortunes as dressmakers,
or milliners, or boarding-house keepers.
Teaching, nursing, cooking, sewing; home-making in all its
ramifications and branches; buying and selling pretty things; the
building and furnishing of houses; the healing of the sick, all of
these are strictly within the feminine province, and you will not make
a mistake if you choose whichever one of these occupations appeals to
your fancy. Women have been unconsciously trained along these lines for
centuries and have for them an inherited aptitude. It takes the average
man years of profound study to acquire the sense of color that a girl
baby is born with. And any dub of a woman can give an architect points
on lights, and kitchen sinks, and the heights of shelves and about
closets. So stick to your last and capitalize your feminine intuitions
instead of trying to invade masculine fields. Even women writers and
women artists are more successful when their work is most womanly.
And great actresses will be remembered for the feminine rôles they
portrayed, not for the masculine parts they essayed and in which they
were grotesque failures.
Having selected your occupation, perfect yourself in it. Master its
technique. Don’t be satisfied to be an also-ran. Make of yourself a
blue-ribbon winner. You will have to work longer hours and harder doing
ill-paid work than you will doing highly paid work. The difference
between a $15 cook and a $10,000 chef is just a matter of skill. One
woman gets $5 for a hat, another $50. It is just the touch to a bow or
ribbon or a twist to a bit of velvet that does it. Whether you get a
thin pay envelope or a thick one as a stenographer, or bookkeeper, or
clerk, depends upon how expert you are. So make up your mind that you
are not going to work for a pittance, and go after the big salary by
making yourself worth it. Employers are just pining to pay the price of
good work.
Then tackle your job as if you meant to make a life-work of it.
Don’t look upon it as a bridge of sighs that you have to travel over
with reluctant feet from the schoolroom to the altar. Think of it as
something you are going to do as long as you live; something that is
going to be your friend, and comforter, and stay, and to which you will
give the best that is in you. That won’t keep you from marrying if the
right man comes along, and it will be a powerful stay if no man comes.
Not many girls do this. They regard their work as only a makeshift
until they can marry, and so they never take the trouble to learn how
to do it properly. That is why they fail, and why they are ill-paid.
Don’t be one of them. Choose a congenial occupation and put your heart
and your back into it, and your success will be assured.
XIII
TRIAL DIVORCE
I believe the one thing that would do more than anything else to stop
the utter wrecking of homes and the half-orphaning of children, in the
case of unhappy marriages, would be the institution of trial divorce
and the refusal of the courts to make any divorce decree absolute under
two years. For so many husbands and wives think they have ceased to
love each other, when they are only too much fed up with each other’s
society. So many persons think they long for freedom, when they only
need a rest. So many persons think divorce a panacea for every ill, who
find out, when they try it, that the remedy is worse than the disease.
The great majority of men and women are romantically in love when they
get married, and they expect to live ever afterward in a state of
storybook bliss. Then comes the inevitable disillusionment, when they
find out that they have married ordinary human beings instead of angels
and motion-picture heroes. Comes the clash of personalities. The fight
of the selfish to get the best for one’s self. The rebellion at the
sacrifices that matrimony demands.
The woman begins to nag. The man gets grouchy and surly. Each magnifies
every fault of the other. Resentment and disappointment blot out every
memory of love and tenderness, of goodness and nobility. They come to
the point where they feel that they cannot stand each other a minute
longer and rush off to the divorce courts.
But the ink is hardly dry on their decrees before they begin to view
each other in a kindlier light. The man, living in his club or at
a boarding house, wandering from restaurant to restaurant, hating
the cooking and getting his digestion upset, begins to think of his
ex-wife’s good points. How true and loyal and devoted she was! What a
good cook and housekeeper! And he wonders that he didn’t have enough
sense of humor to laugh at her nagging instead of letting it get on his
nerves.
The woman, trying to make a home for herself with less money than she
is accustomed to, bewildered and terrified at having to face life for
herself, with no man to depend on, begins to recall her husband’s
virtues instead of his faults, and to reflect that it is better to have
even a husband who is short on compliments, and shy on attentions, and
long on knocks, than to have no husband at all.
And in their secret souls both are conscience-stricken when they look
at their children and see them lacking a mother’s or a father’s care
and a real home. So there are thousands of couples who are merely
disgruntled with each other who would come together again if a trial
divorce gave them time in which the galled spots that the matrimonial
yoke has made on their necks could heal and they could find out that
they hadn’t got such bad teammates, after all.
The trial divorce would do much to solve even those cases in which
husbands and wives think that they have fallen out of love with their
lawful mates and have found their affinities in others. Nine times out
of ten the reason that men and women lose their affection for their
husbands and wives is just because they are bored with them. They have
had an overdose of them. They have seen them too long and at too close
range.
Every woman knows that when she starts off on her summer vacation she
sees her husband as just a hump-shouldered, fat, bald-headed man, who
is slouchy about dressing; but after she has been away a week she
begins to remember what a classical nose he has. In a fortnight she
thinks how handsome and distinguished-looking he is, and by the end of
the month he is a perfect Valentino to her. The man has just the same
reactions about his wife. She goes away fat and frumpy and middle-aged,
and she returns merely plump and more attractive than any flapper to
him.
Many men and women who think they are permanently tired of their
husbands and wives are only temporarily weary of looking at the
same face and listening to the same line of conversation across the
breakfast table, and if a trial divorce gave them a second choice they
would find that they preferred the old love to the new.
For the lure of the “other woman” and the “other man” is chiefly that
they are unattainable and unknown, and these charms vanish before the
trial divorce that makes them possible and familiar. It gives the
foolish, infatuated husband and wife a chance really to compare the
long-haired poet or the short-haired flapper with the partners they had
and are about to lose.
Give a man time to forget his wife’s nagging, and his peaches-and-cream
complexioned secretary will not look as good a risk, after all, to him
as his faithful old wife. Give a woman time to forget the mean things
her husband said to her when they quarreled, and she will think a long
time before she exchanges her good provider for some impecunious glib
love-maker.
The truth is, that few men and women find in divorce the solution of
their woes that they expected. They picture it as a state of bliss in
which they will be free of all woes and cares, an earthly paradise in
which there will be no fretting wives or fault-finding husbands, and in
which they will be able to do exactly as they please. But they find
its golden apples Dead Sea fruit that turns to ashes on their lips. The
man who has resented his wife’s tyranny and writhed under her curtain
lectures, strangely finds out that he wants to go home, when he has no
home to which to go, and nobody to care whether he ever comes back or
not.
The woman who has thought she would be happy if she no longer had to
live with a neglectful husband, finds that the world also neglects her
and that her freedom has merely brought her the freedom of earning her
own living. And when this hard and bitter knowledge soaks into the
consciousness of men and women many of them would be glad enough to go
back again to their old husbands and wives if they could.
So, when we unscramble our scrambled marriage laws, let’s put the trial
divorce into them.
XIV
MARRY THE MAN YOU LOVE
A young woman wants to know whether it is better to marry the man she
loves, or the man who loves her. Both, I should say. Marriage should be
a mutual benefit association in which both parties give and receive;
in which they love and are loved in equal measure. Cupid, however, is
no dispenser of justice. He rarely holds the scales even. Very few
husbands and wives feel the same amount of affection for each other. In
almost every married couple one kisses and the other submits to being
kissed, as the French proverb cynically puts it.
This being the case, it is better for the woman to be the kisser than
the kissee, because, while it is misfortune to a woman never to be
loved, it is a tragedy to her never to love.
Of course, every woman desires to be worshiped by some man, and she
dreams of having a husband who will be a perpetual lover and spend his
life laying tributes at her feet. She feels that she would be perfectly
happy doing the goddess-on-a-pedestal act, and occasionally deigning
to bestow a kind word on her adorer, as one throws a bone to a dog.
Obsessed by this romantic vision, which flatters her vanity, many a
woman is beguiled into marrying a man for whom she has only a mild
liking because he is so crazy about her. She thinks that he can supply
enough love for two, and that she will be happy and satisfied with just
being loved.
It does not take her long to find out that she has made a sad mistake,
and that there is nothing with which we can get so easily satiated as
we can with the affection we do not return. We have no appetite for it
and it is tasteless in our mouths. Nor are there any greater bores than
those who love us, who cling to us, who want to be always with us, but
whom we do not love and of whom we get tired to death.
All of us know doormat husbands whose wives ruthlessly trample them
under foot. We all know peevish, disgruntled, discontented wives, whose
husbands slave to give them luxuries for which they never get so much
as—“Thank you.” We have all held up our hands in horror when some wife
left a good, devoted husband and eloped with another man or packed her
trunk and hiked out for Hollywood, and we wondered what was the matter
with these women that they were not satisfied with their husband’s love.
The trouble with them was that they had married men who loved them
instead of men they loved. If they had been doing the love-making and
trying to hold the affections of husbands whom they suspected every
flapper of trying to steal from them, they would have been too busy,
too thrilled and interested to get into mischief.
There are many reasons why a woman who is contemplating matrimony
should lay greater stress upon the state of her own affections than
she does upon the man’s. The principal one, of course, is because a
woman is ten times as much married to her husband as he is to her, and
therefore it is ten times more important that she should be pleased
with her bargain than it is that he should be satisfied with his.
A married man has a million interests, and distractions, and
amusements, and compensations outside of his home, and if his wife does
not turn out to be all that his fondest fancy painted her, he has his
business to fall back upon, his ambition and his career to console him.
He is never wholly dependent on his wife for his happiness. But a woman
stakes her all on her matrimonial gamble, and if she does not love her
husband, if she does not find happiness in her home, she has nothing.
A woman’s emotions make her life. What she feels is of more interest
to her than what she does. She cannot substitute liking for loving any
more than she can water for wine. And no matter how much she admires
the man to whom she is married, no matter how grateful she is to him
for his kindness to her, unless he can raise a thrill in her breast
everything is cinders, ashes and dust to her.
She feels that she has missed the best thing in life, the thing she
most wanted; and she is restless and dissatisfied, and is forever on a
still hunt to find her real soul-mate.
To the average woman, marriage is a state of perpetual sacrifice. She
must go through the agony of bearing children, and the long, weary
years of ceaseless care and anxiety in rearing them. She must work
harder than any hireling at the dull and monotonous task of cooking and
cleaning and scrubbing and sewing and mending that it takes to make a
comfortable home. And the only thing on earth that can make all of this
worth while is love for her husband. That sets a star in her sky. That
gilds the humblest task. The woman who stands over a stove cooking a
dinner for the husband to whom she is utterly indifferent is a slave
driven to her appointed task by her sense of duty. The woman who stands
over a stove cooking dinner for a husband she adores is a priestess
making a burnt offering of herself on the altar of her god.
The woman who marries the man she loves is never bored, and boredom is
the particular curse of the feminine sex. She throws herself heart and
soul into her husband’s interests, and is more eager for his success
than he is himself. She is never dull, because the smallest thing that
concerns him is of more import to her than the events that shake the
great outer world. She can find food for thought and scope for her
activities in the fact that her husband likes onions with his beefsteak
or prefers mushrooms. Her days are filled with pleasurable excitement
in preparing for his homecoming of an evening, and when she hears his
key in the latch her heart strikes up “Hail to the King.”
The woman who marries the man she loves is never dissatisfied, never
disgruntled. He may be a poor thing, but he is her own, the one she cut
out of the bunch and which she marked with her own brand. Having got
the one thing she wanted most, she can well afford to pity her poor
sisters who have only limousines and pearls and the merely tolerated
husbands who are the purveyors thereof. A woman should always marry
a man with whom she is very much in love, because it insures her a
stimulating and interesting life. The reason that most women run down
and get slack and slouchy is because they are bored to tears with
domesticity. They do not care for their husbands and so they take no
trouble to please them.
But the woman who is in love with her husband, who married the man she
wanted, is on her tiptoes all of the time. She means to keep him and
she takes no chances on disillusioning him with curl papers, and cold
cream, and bad cooking, and tantrums. She is eternally in pursuit; and
while there may be times when she gets tired and feels as if she would
like to sit down and take things easy, still there is no denying that
the love chase puts pep in any lady’s day.
A woman should never marry any man except the one with whom she is very
much in love, because every woman craves romance, and if she doesn’t
get it at home she is very apt to seek it abroad, or else she goes
through life hungry, unsatisfied. The wives who get into scandals; who
think they find soul-mates in their preachers, or their doctors, or
long-haired poets; the wives who run off after strange cults and who
burden down the mails with letters to movie actors are all women who
married men they didn’t love.
The women who are crazily in love with their husbands make their own
angel’s food at home and don’t have to go around trying to pick up
stray crumbs on the street. Of course, the woman who loves her husband
better than he does her has her moments of acute jealousy, but even
these are full of ginger and are better than the dull stagnation of
having a man that you don’t take the trouble to lock up at night
because you know you can’t lose him.
Truly, it is more blessed to give than to receive, and it is better for
a woman to love than to be loved.
XV
ARE YOU GOOD COMPANY FOR YOURSELF?
Do you ever think what poor company most of us are for ourselves? It
is strange but true that the one individual on God’s earth who bores
the average man and woman more than any one else is just himself
and herself. There is no society they so dread as their own, and no
expedient so desperate that they will not resort to it rather than be
left alone with themselves. They will fasten themselves like leeches
on kinspeople and friends who try to shake them loose. They will stay
on in homes where they know they are not welcome. They will put up
with any discomfort in order to herd together. They will hold up the
telephone poles at the corners of streets, and walk the aisles of the
department stores until they are ready to drop with fatigue.
They will belong to clubs where they foregather with the dull and
prosy and fat-witted, and where they spend hours listening to egotists
monologue about how great and wonderful they are. Evening after evening
they go to vaudeville performances whose every turn is so stupid it
is enough to make even a hero scream with pain, and to see moving
pictures whose scenarios are an insult to the intelligence of an idiot.
Anything—anywhere, to get away from themselves, to escape having to
spend an hour in their own company. So universal is the belief that it
is the limit of social and mental poverty to be reduced to your own
society for company, that we speak of those who live alone as being
lonesome, and pity them accordingly.
It does not even occur to us that they may have that within themselves
which could make them gay and witty companions to themselves, of whom
they would never tire.
It is easy, of course, to see why many people are bored to tears with
their own company. Men and women who never read anything can’t have
very much that is new and interesting to say to themselves. After they
have discussed the state of the green grocery trade with themselves,
on which they are rather fed up anyway after having wrestled with
it all day, or mulled over the last gossip about the neighbors next
door, and wondered for the millionth time how the Joneses can afford a
new car, and where the Smith girl has been spending the evening when
she came home at 3 A. M., they find that they have exhausted their
conversational repertoire.
But if they are reading people they can never have a dull instant
when they are alone, for every book, every magazine, every newspaper
is a magic carpet that takes them in an instant into the uttermost
parts of the world. There isn’t a strange sight they may not see, or a
secret whispered behind a closed door they may not hear; nor a romance
unfolded whose thrill does not touch their hearts and stir their pulse.
Education and cultivation would be worth while if they did nothing else
except take the curse off loneliness.
You can see how people who are envious and jealous and quarrelsome and
mean-spirited dread to be left alone with themselves. They have devils
from hell for company, those men and women whose souls are filled with
bitterness and hate, and who are forever thrashing over old grievances,
recalling old wrongs, bringing to life again old enmities.
We all avoid the pessimistic and the cynical—those who can see nothing
cheerful or good in the world, and with whom even a chance meeting
seems to take the warmth out of the sunshine, and God out of His
heaven, and make all life dark and foul. How terrible, then, must it
be to live with yourself when you have nothing to say to yourself that
does not leave a dark-brown taste in your mouth? It is not strange
that those who have lived hard and selfish and grasping lives are poor
company for themselves.
You cannot imagine a widow spending a cheery evening recalling how she
nagged her poor, dead husband, how cross and peevish and complaining
she was, or how little she had done to repay him for all that he had
done for her. Neither can you imagine a woman enjoying telling herself
that if she had been less extravagant, and content with simple things,
if she hadn’t demanded fine clothes and jewels and trips to Europe,
that her husband would not have had to kill himself working, and that
she might now have some one to talk to, living and breathing, instead
of a demon of remorse.
It is not strange that a man wants other company than the recollection
of how his coldness and neglect turned the bright, joyous, loving,
tender girl he married into a quiet, sad woman who cringed like a
whipped dog before his cruel fault-finding. Nor is it strange that
the man who has driven hard bargains and overreached in trade, who
has ground down the faces of those who worked for him, who has taken
advantage of the ignorant and the trustful, and built his fortune
on the ruins of widows and children, does not find his own society
exhilarating.
When we are old we have nothing but our memories left us. They are
enough company if they are filled with the smiling faces of those we
loved, who recall to us kindly acts we have done, helping hands we have
held out, and if they murmur to us of kindly, gracious deeds. But they
are terrible companions if they are filled with memories of cruelty
and wrong. Considering that, do what we may, we can never escape from
ourselves, that we are bound to endure our own society, is it not a
pity that we do not emulate the poet who said, “My mind to me a kingdom
is,” and make ourselves better company for ourselves!
XVI
KEEPING YOUNG