Sally Ann, who is a poor girl marrying a poor young man, has to have
piles of orchid chiffon undergarments, hand-embroidered and belaced
and beribboned. It is because they are to be displayed to her catty
friends, who will finger them, and appraise them, and criticize them,
and then go home wondering how her father is ever going to pay for
them. If her lingerie were not Exhibit A at the wedding Sally Ann would
go along and provide herself with a reasonable amount of underwear that
would stand wear and washing, and not run papa into debt.
But Sally Ann has to have her show wedding. She has to trail up the
church aisle in her white satin and her tulle veil, and all the rest
of it. And by the time father has paid for the church and the flowers,
and the bridesmaid’s presents, and the reception, and the automobiles,
he has had to borrow money at the bank and has saddled himself with a
debt that bends his back a little more, and puts new lines in his face,
and adds to his burden in work and worry, which was already more than
he could bear. And it has all been for a few minutes’ flaunting of
herself in the face of an audience of people who smiled and nudged each
other, and said: “Did you ever see her look so homely? Brides always
look their worst.” “Wonder what he ever saw in her to make him pick her
out.” “Is that the bridegroom? Looks like a scared rabbit.” “How on
earth do you suppose her father will ever pay for this? Everybody knows
he can’t afford it,” and so on, and so on. Just what everybody says at
a wedding.
Above all, the abolition of the show wedding and the saving of the
foolish expenditure it involved would enable many a young couple to set
up housekeeping out of debt; and, best of all, they would begin life
simply and honestly, and with the admiration and gratitude of all who
know them. Getting married is the crucial act in a man’s and woman’s
life. It is the most awful and solemn thing they ever do. And why they
want to have a thousand curious eyes peering at them when they take the
step that is going to plunge them into hell or lift them into heaven
passes comprehension. It would not be more incongruous to send out
invitations to people to come and watch you die than it is to come and
see you married.
Wise that young couple who simply slip around to the parson and make
their vows at the altar, with no one but God to look on.
LII
WHEN YOUR CHILDREN ARE GLAD YOU DIE
Parents seem to run to extremes. Of the common, or garden, variety
of fathers and mothers there appears to be two types. One is the
overindulgent, which lavishes too much money, too many fine clothes,
too many motorcars on its offspring, and that brings up its children to
be idle and worthless wasters and spenders. The other type of parent is
the Spartan one that is as hard as nails, unsympathetic, close-fisted;
that denies its children every indulgence, and that holds to the theory
that the harder it makes life for the young the better it is for them.
Both schools of thought are wrong.
Undoubtedly, parents make a very great mistake when they sacrifice
everything to their children and make doormats of themselves for their
children to walk on. They weaken their sons and daughters by pampering
them too much and by standing between them and the struggle that alone
makes muscle of body and soul, and they do their children a cruel
injustice by cultivating in them extravagant tastes and habits that
perhaps they cannot later on give them the money to gratify. Certainly
it is an unedifying spectacle to behold, as we often do, a mother in
patched, made-over clothes, while her daughters fare forth in the
latest imported Parisian models, or a seedy father riding on the street
car while son burns up the road in a speedy sports car and is decked
out like Solomon in all his glory.
Also we can but deplore the folly of parents who skimp, and slave, and
deny themselves every comfort in order that their daughters can make
a splurge in society, and that their sons may loaf through college
courses, where they acquire nothing but a college yell and a contempt
for their hump-shouldered old dads. We could weep when we see tired
old women who are converted into unpaid nursemaids by their married
daughters who are always coming in and dumping their babies down on
mother when they want to go off on a trip or play bridge. And what
tears we have left we could shed over the men whose sons are always
getting into trouble and coming back to father for help when they know
that they are robbing him of the pittance he has saved up for his old
age.
But between doing everything for your children and doing nothing at all
for them is a long step, and the parents who do not help their children
to get a start in life fail just as much in doing their duty to them as
do the foolishly fond parents who kill their children’s initiative by
swaddling them in cotton wool. Of course, necessity is a grim teacher.
If you chuck a child into the water where it must sink or swim, it is
pretty apt to strike out and keep afloat somehow. And it is true that
a great many successful men and women are the children of parents who
were so poor that they could do nothing for them, and that they fought
their way to an education and battled their way to success against all
sorts of hardships. But there is a great difference between the parents
who cannot help their children and those who will not help their
children, between the fathers and mothers who would give their heart’s
blood to their children and those who will not give them a few dollars.
And while the children may feel all love and reverence for the poor
parents who were powerless to assist them, they can but feel bitter
resentment toward the parents who stand callously by, watching their
struggles without holding out a helping hand.
A large number of parents have an idea that it does young people good
to be deprived of pleasures, to be reared to no indulgences, to know
hardships. And so even when they have plenty of money they deny their
children pretty clothes and the advantages of education and travel, and
when they get married they let them scuffle for themselves. They do not
give the girl a dowry nor set the boy up in business.
It seems to me that this is a cruel and an inhuman thing to do, and
that it serves no purpose but to kill in the child’s breast every
particle of affection it had for its father and mother. For it dooms
the children to years of struggle and self-sacrifice, pinching
economies and anxieties that it might so easily have escaped. And God
knows that life is not so easy for any of us that we can afford to have
any of the pleasure taken out of it.
It also often shuts the door of opportunity for the child or puts off
success for many weary years. The few thousands of dollars that father
might have invested in the firm which would have raised Tom from being
a clerk to a partner might have carried him on to fortune. If father
would have financed the extra course of study in his profession for
John, he would have achieved success and begun big money making years
before he did. If father had given Mary an allowance big enough to
hire servants, she would not have worked herself to death cooking, and
washing, and baby tending. But father wouldn’t do it. He held on to
every penny and let his children fight it out the best way they could.
The daughter of such a man once said to me:
“My father is dead and I have inherited a large fortune, but it has
come to me too late to do me any real good. When I was a girl I never
had any pretty clothes. I never had a nice home to invite my friends
to. I never had any indulgences. I never could even go with the people
I was entitled to go with because I did not live in the style they did.
I married a poor man and my father never helped us. I wore my youth out
in housework that I was not strong enough to do. If he had given me
$10,000 when I needed it, it would have done me more good than all that
I have inherited does me now.”
The moral of all of which is, do not sacrifice yourself to your
children; do not impoverish yourself for them, but help than all you
can while they are young and while they need it, if you do not wish
them to be glad when you are dead and your will is read.
LIII
WHAT PRICE PLEASURE?
Do you ever ask yourself if you are not paying too high a price for
many of the things in which you indulge yourself? So far as material
things go, most of us are keen enough about seeing that we get our
money’s worth. We do not pay a thousand dollars for a string of glass
beads. We do not buy a battered flivver at Rolls Royce figures, nor
will we stand being charged banquet prices for a corned beef and
cabbage dinner.
When it comes to spiritual values, however, we lose all sense of
proportion. We become spendthrifts, who throw our priceless treasures
away, and we literally sell our birthrights for a mess of pottage. One
thinks of this particularly just now when one watches so many young
persons making such bad and losing bargains with fate. There are the
boys scarcely out of their teens who think it is such a sporting thing,
so dashing, and that it shows that they are such men of the world to
carry flasks on their hips and drink the vile poison that bootleggers
sell. For the sake of the kick they get out of this and for a few
minutes’ exhilaration, they are risking not only death itself, but what
is far, far worse, blindness and imbecility and every sort of nervous
ailment.
Look at the pasty-faced, blear-eyed youths with shaking hands that you
see all about you, their minds dulled, their energies paralyzed, their
ambitions killed by drink; who are done with life before they have ever
begun to live. What a price they have paid for booze! Can any boy look
at a drunken sot, dirty, poor, despised, and think that the pleasure
that he has got out of drink has paid for what it cost him?
And the girls. The girls who are mad for gaiety, crazy for the
admiration of men; the girls who go on drinking parties, who indulge
in petting parties, who joy-ride until all hours of the night, who let
men kiss and fondle them because that is the price that men demand
for taking them out. How cheaply they sell themselves! Many a girl
pays with shame and disgrace that follow her to the longest day she
lives for a single wild party. They buy their fun high, these girls
who exchange for it their self-respect, their modesty, their maidenly
innocence and their good names.
The family quarrel. That is a domestic luxury for which we have to
pay so dearly that it is never worth the cost. Undoubtedly, when one
is feeling cross, and irritable, and disgruntled, there is a certain
luxury in letting go all of one’s self-control, and turning one’s
temper loose, and stabbing right and left with cruel words that wound
like dagger thrusts. Also it salves one’s own conscience to lay the
blame for everything that goes wrong on some one else. Therefore, many
husbands and wives go on a daily orgy of nerves and temper. They vent
their spleen against life on each other. They say to each other all the
mean and hateful things that they are too politic to say to strangers.
But the price they pay! It bankrupts them. For they kill each other’s
love. They slay each other’s respect. They inevitably come to hate each
other and to cherish secret grudges, born of insult and injustice.
There is no peace nor tenderness in their homes and their marriages
either end in divorce or become long drawn out misery. What a price to
pay for the lack of a little self-control!
Extravagance. The price of indulging yourself in your youth in the
things that you cannot afford is poverty and dependence in your old
age. The woman who cannot resist pretty clothes. The woman who is
bitten by the society bug and who tries to keep up with people better
off than she is. The man who belongs to lodges, when he can’t pay the
rent collector. The man who buys an automobile and a radio on the
instalment plan. They will pay, as sure as fate, for gratifying the
desire of the moment by long years of bitter dependence. Twenty or
thirty years from now they will be down and out, and they will either
be in almshouses or the hangers on of relatives, who resent having to
take care of Poor Uncle John or Cousin Susan. Or they will be burdens
on their children, who are having all they can do to take care of their
own families.
The highest priced cars in the world are not the gold-plated,
satin-lined jewel boxes made for millionaires. They are the cheap
little cars bought by the people who cannot afford them and who have to
go into debt for them.
And there is the price the lazy pay for shiftlessness. And the price
the mother pays who lets her children roam the streets while she plays
bridge or goes to clubs. And the price the sarcastic pay who alienate
a friend for the sake of making a witty speech. There are a thousand
other little gratifications of a mood or inclination, the desire of a
moment, that we pay for with tears, with loneliness, with failure, with
our very heart’s blood. What a pity we don’t count the cost of things
before we indulge ourselves in them!
LIV
THE IDEAL MOTHER
A woman asks: “What qualities should the ideal mother possess?”
To begin with, a mother should have love, and tenderness, and sympathy,
and be willing to sacrifice herself for her children. These are the
stock virtues of motherhood, and virtually all mothers possess them.
But they alone do not make a woman a good mother. Often they do as
much harm as good, for you can ruin a child by blind devotion. You
can enfeeble it by too much tenderness. You can make it a selfish
egotist and an overbearing brute by making yourself a doormat for it
to walk over. So to love, tenderness, sympathy and unselfishness the
ideal mother must add other qualities, and the most important of these
is the ability to see her job as a whole and to realize that she is
responsible for the finished goods that she turns out.
Not many mothers have this vision; or, rather, they shut their eyes
and refuse to see that the molding of their children’s characters,
the settling of their destinies, is in their own hands. They let a
high-tempered child grow up undisciplined and without teaching it any
self-control. They let a slothful, lazy one grow up without forming
habits of industry. They never teach a self-indulgent, greedy child to
curb its appetite. They spoil and pamper their children, and then they
say that they “hope” their children will turn out all right!
The ideal mother knows that you form children’s characters in the
cradle, and so she does not trust to luck with her youngsters. She
begins when they are babies to teach them self-control, and thrift,
and industry, and all the principles of right living. The ideal mother
must have a backbone. Unfortunately, most mothers permit their hearts
to crowd out their spinal column until they have no more backbone than
a fishing worm. This is why you hear women say despairingly that they
can’t do a thing with their 10-year-old child.
It takes nerve, and grit, and determination, and courage to fight
self-willed youngsters, and mother is too soft to do it. So she gives
in rather than listen to her baby’s howls of rage or go through the
struggle of conquering a disobedient child. And the inevitable result
is that her children have a contempt for her as a weakling, and ride
roughshod over her, and become the outbreaking young hoodlums who fill
our jails and brothels.
The ideal mother is a human being. She doesn’t pose before her children
as a plaster saint or an oracle on a pedestal. One of the reasons why
children do not confide in their parents is because the average father
and mother pretend that they were such models of all the virtues when
they were young that their children feel they have nothing in common
with them and that they wouldn’t understand how a boy or girl feels who
wants to do all sorts of foolish things.
How can a girl tell her mother that a boy kissed her, if mother
represents herself as Miss Prunes and Prisms, and says that when _she_
was young girls never skylarked, and never went on joy-rides or to
cabarets, or held hands in the movies, but spent a pleasant evening
sitting up in the parlor in the presence of their elders discussing
improving topics?
It is the human mothers who can sympathize with their children’s desire
for good times and help them to them; who will stretch a point to get
a girl a new frock or a boy the fraternity pin he craves, who get well
enough acquainted with their children to really help them and guard
them.
The ideal mother has a sense of proportion. She doesn’t see her
ducklings as swans. Her love doesn’t blind her to her children’s faults
and blemishes. Rather it sharpens her vision, so that she gets a line
on them as they really are. Thereby she is enabled to help them make
the most of such gifts as they have. She sees that Tom is brilliant
but unstable and lacking in purpose, and she holds him to whatever he
undertakes to do until she forms the habit of steadfastness in him.
She sees that John is dull but a plodder, and she trains him for some
occupation in which quickness of mind is not demanded and in which
the prizes go to faithfulness and hard work. She sees that Mary is
intelligent but homely, and lacking the charms that allure men, so
she gives her some occupation by which she can make a good living for
herself and which will fill her life with interest. And this sense of
proportion keeps her from making her children ridiculous by bragging
about them, and boring every one with whom she comes in contact with
endless stories of what wonderful and marvelous creatures they are,
and how, wherever they go, they are the cynosure of all eyes and the
admiration of all beholders.
Finally, the ideal mother should have a sense of humor that will enable
her to laugh instead of cry over many of her children’s peccadilloes
and keep her from taking them too seriously. For the thing that ails
young people is chiefly youth, and they will get over that if you
will give them a little time. Because they are idle, irresponsible,
pleasure-loving, dance-mad, girl and boy crazy is no reason for
prophesying dismal things about them and wringing your hands in
despair. It is a passing phase of life at which we elders may well
grin, remembering the time when we also were young and foolish. An old
woman who had raised up a remarkable family of sons and daughters once
gave me this as her recipe for bringing up children: “Kiss them when
they are good. Spank them when they’re bad and teach them to obey you.”
That is the whole of the law and the prophets.
LV
HOW TO CATCH A WIFE
“You are always telling girls how to catch husbands,” says a young man.
“Why don’t you give us chaps a few tips about how to get wives?”
Well, son, perhaps I unconsciously favor women because I belong to
their lodge. Also, it is more difficult for a woman to catch a husband
than it is for a man to get a wife, not only because women are more
inclined to matrimony than men are, but because a woman’s pursuit of
a man has to be stealthy and secret and under cover, with all of her
tracks carefully hidden and her purposes veiled, whereas a man can go
after a woman openly and aboveboard, with everybody looking on and
applauding the chase. Therefore, the woman is more in need of any stray
hints that may improve her technique than the man is. Still, far be it
from me to withhold from my brothers any information I may have about
the short cuts to the feminine heart. So to the really earnest seeker
after knowledge on this subject I would say:
First. Study your girl. Catalogue her. Find out to what type she
belongs and adapt your tactics to the situation, for all women no more
rise to the same line of courtship than all fish bite at the same bait.
There are some feminine hearts that can only be taken by assault and
battery and others that surrender to patient siege. There are women
whose love is for sale to the highest bidder and others who bestow it
in pity. There are women who like a business proposition and women who
fall only for the romantic wooing. So there you are, and your success
will depend upon your ability to psychoanalyze the particular woman and
upon the skill with which you suggest to her that you are the great
unsatisfied need of her soul.
If the girl is of the clear-eyed, upstanding, competent business
type, your best method of winning her is by the good, old, well-tried
Platonic friendship method. She isn’t anxious to exchange a mahogany
desk for a kitchen range nor to give up a good pay envelope and an easy
job to toil for some man for nothing. Likewise, she has worked with men
too long for her to see any rosy halo around the masculine brow, so
she is pretty apt to shy off at any suggestion of marriage and balk at
the thought of the altar. But life lacks savor to every woman without
masculine society, and so this particular type of woman is especially
allured by the idea of a beautiful and satisfying friendship with some
man. And when a chap has got his toe that far into the door to a
woman’s heart it is his own fault if he does not open it all the way.
Only there is this word of warning: Never pop the question to the
business girl in the morning of a sunshiny day when she has on a new
frock and a good hat and everything is going swimmingly at the office
and she feels fit and fine and ready to buck the world. Instead, choose
a rainy evening, when she is sitting alone at home, dejected and
forlorn, when she is tired and the boss has been grumpy. Then the thing
she wants most on earth is just a nice, strong masculine shoulder to
cry on.
If the girl you want is a flapper, your best ally is your bankbook. All
you need to look good to her is to be a good spender and a fast worker.
Hold not your hand and count not the cost of jewelry and trinketry and
candy and flowers and cabarets and eats and joy-rides, and remember
that the man with the longest purse wins. Some day she will jazz with
you to the preacher, and you will live scrappily ever afterward.
If the girl upon whom your affections are set is a demure little
Puritan, make her your Mother Confessor. Confide to her all your sins,
real and imaginary. Invent a dark past for her benefit. Make her
believe that but for her Sacred Influence you would become an abandoned
character and that she alone can lead you up to the higher life. All
women have the reformation complex, and the better they are and the
less they know of the world the harder they fall for the belief that a
grown man’s character is like a piece of dough that they can mold into
any shape they please. Once let a girl get the idea into her head that
she is responsible for your soul, and she is yours for the taking.
If the girl you want is one that you made mud pies with in childhood
and went to school with, and who refuses to see you in a sentimental
light, don’t be discouraged by her telling you that she will be a
sister to you. Just keep right on strutting your Rachel-and-Jacob
stuff. Mighty few women can resist that. Make yourself a habit with the
girl. Make yourself necessary to her happiness and comfort by always
paying her the little attentions that women like. Fetch and carry for
her. Be the one person in the world she can always depend upon to make
life pleasant and agreeable for her.
Then suddenly drop her cold. Begin paying furious attentions to some
woman she always accuses of being made up and older than she looks and
an artful hussy, and it is a hundred-to-one bet that she will call you
back and let you see that her feelings toward you were not at all what
she had supposed they were. For when she thinks you are about to marry
another woman she will wake up to the fact that life will be cinders,
ashes and dust without you.
If the girl you desire is one of the morbid sort who hangs between “I
will” and “I won’t,” who is always vivisecting her heart and taking
her emotional temperature, what you need to use is caveman methods.
She is just dying to have you drag her to the altar by the hair of her
head, and if you are half a man you will do it. Don’t ever ask that
kind of a woman to marry you. Tell her you are going to marry her and
that you have the license and the ring in your pocket and are on the
way to the chapel with her, and you will give her a thrill that will
last a lifetime.
These are only a few of the many ways to win a wife. It is dead easy,
and any man can do it who has gumption enough to work out a cross-word
puzzle.
LVI
DANGEROUS GIRLS