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[210] glum look over the expenses of house-keeping is a fulfilment of your promise to love and cherish? Does it bring sunshine, and lighten toil, and bless her with knightly grace? Do you not know that it is only a way of regretting that you married her? You go out to your shop, or sit down to your newspaper, and forget all about it. She sits down to her sewing, or stands over her cooking-stove, and meditates upon it with indescribable pain. These very men, who complain because it costs so much to live, will lose by bad debts more than their wives spend; they will, by sheer negligence, by a selfish reluctance to present a bill to a disagreeable person, by a cowardly fear lest insisting on what is due should alienate a customer,--by indorsing a note, or lending money, through mere want of courage to say No,--lose money enough to foot up a dozen bills. They waste money in cigars; in sending packages by express, rather than have the trouble to take them themselves; in buying luxuries which they were better without. A man is persistently, perversely, and with malice aforethought, extravagant. He is so, in spite of admonition and remonstrance. Where his personal comfort or interest is concerned, he scorns a sacrifice. He laughs at the suggestion that such a little thing makes any difference one way or another.

This is a long extract from Miss Hamilton, but every word is solid gold, and should be printed and framed and hung up in every husband's — well, wheresoever he keeps his cigars, so that he would be sure to see it. I myself have heard a man ask a wife who had borne them twelve children, and who was an economical, painstaking, thrifty house-keeper, “What she did with the last dollar he gave her?” True, men do not like to see this unpleasant reflection of themselves in our author's glass; but that is no reason why she should smash it. And as she once remarked to a married lady, who told her

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Gail Hamilton (1)
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