A MISTAKE ON JOHN'S PART.
It is not discreditable to the sex to assert that a man is first
attracted marriage-ward by the desire of the eye. He falls in love, as a
rule, because she who presently becomes the only woman in the universe
to him is goodly to view, if not actually beautiful. Goodliness being
largely contingent upon apparel, it follows that Mary dresses for
John--up to the marriage-day. He who descries signs of slatternliness in
his beloved prior to that date, may well be shocked to disillusionment.
As a girl in a home where the mother takes upon herself the heaviest
work, and spares her pretty daughter's hands and clothes all the soil
and wear she can avert, Mary must be indolent or phenomenally
indifferent to what occupies so much of other women's thoughts, if she
do not always appear in her lover's presence neatly and--to the best of
her ability--becomingly attired. She quickly acquaints herself with his
taste in the matter of women's costumes, and adapts hers to it, wearing
his favorite colors, giving preference to the gowns he has praised, and
arranging her hair in the fashion he has chanced to admire in her
hearing.
In the work-a-day world of matrimonial life, much of all this
undergoes a change. Washington Irving lived and died a fastidious,
unpractical bachelor, or he might have modified the sketch of "The
Wife," the Mary who, after unpacking trunks, washing china, pots and
kettles, putting closets to rights, laying carpets, hanging pictures,
clearing away straw, sawdust, and what in that day corresponded with
jute--dusting and shelving books--and performing the hundred other
duties contingent upon sitting down in the modest cottage hired by her
bankrupt husband,--got tea ready (presumably preparing potatoes for
the same) picked a big mess of strawberries from a bed opportunely
discovered in the garden, donned a white muslin robe and sat down to
the piano to while away a lagging hour while awaiting her Leslie's
return.
The John of our common-sensible age knows in his sober mind that his
bride, in the effort to accomplish one-fourth as much, would equip
herself in a brown gingham, tie a big apron before her, draw a pair of
his discarded gloves with truncated fingers upon her hands, and be too
tired at night to do more than boil the kettle for the cup of tea which
he is more than likely to drink at the kitchen table, spread with a
newspaper--the linen not having been yet dug out of the case in which
"mother and the girls" packed it.
As the months wear on, Mary learns, if her spouse does not, that white
muslin comes to grief so speedily in the course of even light
housework, as to swell the laundry bills inordinately. The embroidered
tea-gowns in which she used to array herself upon the rare occasions
of her betrothed's morning calls, gather dust streaks upon skirts and
the under sides of the sleeves, and, watch as she may, catch spots in
the kitchen. She considers,--being lovingly determined to help, not
hinder her mate,--that his purse must purchase new garments when her
trousseau is worn out, and she saves her best clothes for "occasions."
John, being her husband, is no longer an occasion. Dark prints and
ginghams, simply made, and freshened up at meal-times by full white
aprons, are serviceable, sensible, economical and significant of our
dear Mary's practical wisdom. They are by so many degrees less
becoming to her than the dainty apparel of loverly memory, that we do
not wonder at the surprised discontent of the young husband.
Marriage has made no distinct change in his apparel. In his business a
man must be decent, or he loses credit. In masculine ignorance of the
immutable law that in dislodging dirt some must cling to the garments
and person of the toiler, he sets down his wife's altered appearance
to indifference to his happiness. She may have labored from an early
breakfast to a late dinner to make his home comfortable and tasteful;
into each of the dishes served up with secret pride for his
consumption, may have gone a wealth of love and earnest desire that
would have set up ten poets in sonnets and madrigals. Because her
hands are roughened and her complexion muddied by her work, and--in
the knowledge that dishes are to be washed and the table re-set for
breakfast, and the kitchen cleared up after he has been regaled--she
has slipped on a dark frock in which she was wont to receive him on
rainy evenings--he falls into a brown and cynical study, which
dishonors his wife only a little more than it disgraces himself and
human nature. "Time was"--so runs his musing--"when she thought it
worth her while to take pains to look pretty. That was when there was
still a chance of a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip. She has me fast
now, and anything is good enough for a husband."
Not one syllable of this chapter is penned for the woman who deserves
an iota of censure like the above. It is a wife's duty to study to
look well in her husband's eyes, always and in all circumstances. Her
person should be scrupulously clean, her hair becomingly arranged, her
working-gown as neat as she can keep it, and relieved before John
comes in by clean collar or ruching and a smooth white apron. It is
altogether possible for the woman who "does her own work" to be as
"well set-up"--to borrow a sporting phrase from John--as her rich
neighbor who can drag a train over Oriental rugs from the moment she
rises to a late breakfast until she sweeps yards of brocade and velvet
up the polished stairs after ball, dinner or theatre-party.
What I have to do with now is John's unreasonable desire that his wife
should--as the help-meet of a man who has his own way to make in the
world--dress as well as when she was the unmarried daughter of an
elderly gentleman whose way was made. Every sensible girl married to a
poor man comprehends, as one trait of wifely duty, that she must make
her trousseau last and look well as long as she can. In the honorable
dread of suggesting to him whose fortune she has elected to share, that
when her handsome gowns are no longer wearable she must replace lace
with cotton lawns, and silk with all-wool merino or serge, she devises
excuses for sparing the costly fabrics--pretexts which, to his shame it
is said, he is prone to misunderstand. If men such as he could guess at
the repressed longings for the brave array of other times that assail
the wearers of well-saved--therefore _passee_--finery, at sight of other
women less conscientious, or with richer husbands than themselves,
reveling in the latest and most enticing modes--if eyes scornful of
plain attire could penetrate to the jealously locked closet where
feminine vanity and native extravagance are kept under watch and ward by
the love the critic is ready to doubt,--print, gingham and stuff gowns
would be fairer than ermine and velvet in John's esteem.