boy and has learned to
become a man. The queenhood, therefore, of personal and domestic
interference lies with wives, and they know how to use the prerogative
they assume.

Take an unlucky man who smokes under protest, his wife not liking to
forbid the pleasure entirely, but always grudging it, and interfering
with its exercise. Each segar represents a battle, deepening in
intensity according to the number. The first may have been had with only
a light skirmish perhaps, perhaps a mere threatening of an attack that
passed away without coming to actual onslaught; the second brings up the
artillery; while the third or fourth lets all the forces loose, and sets
the biggest guns thundering. She could understand a man smoking one
segar in the day, she says, with a gracious condescension to masculine
weakness; but when it comes to more she feels that she is called on to
interfere, and to do her best towards checking such a reprehensible
excess. It does not weaken her position that she knows nothing of what
she is talking about. She never smoked a segar herself, and therefore
does not understand the uses or the abuses of tobacco; but she holds
herself pledged to interfere as soon as she gets the chance, and she
redeems the pledge with energy.

The man too, who has the stomach of an ostrich and an appetite to
correspond, but about whom the home superstition is that he has a feeble
digestion and must take care of his diet, has also to run the gauntlet
of his wife's interfering forces. He never dines or sups jollily with
his friends without being plucked at and reminded that salmon always
disagrees with him; that champagne is sure to give him a headache
to-morrow; and "My dear! when you know how bad salad is for you!" or,
"How can you eat that horrid pastry! You will be so ill in the night!"
"What! more wine? another glass of whisky? how foolish you are! how
wrong!" The wife has a nervous organization which cannot bear
stimulants; the husband is a strong large-framed man who can drink deep
without feeling it; but to the excitable woman her feeble limit is her
husband's measure, and as soon as he has gone beyond the range of her
own short tether, she trots after him remonstrating, and thinks herself
justified in interfering with his progress. For women cannot be brought
to understand the capacities of a man's life; they cannot be made to
understand that what is bad for themselves may not be bad for others,
and that their weaknes