leaves of the
time-table to discover the next boat for the Antipodes. As I said
before, more homes are broken up, not by the flying fire-irons, but by
the irritating little personal idiosyncrasies which men and women exhibit
when they are, so they declare, "quite natural and at their ease." Only
a mother's love can survive the accompaniment of suction noises with
soup. Vice always makes the innocent suffer, but suffering is often
bearable, and sometimes it ennobles us; but chewing raw tobacco--even
perpetually chewing chewing gum--is unbearable, and has a most ignoble
effect on the temper, especially the temper of life's Monday mornings.

Even for our virtues do we sometimes run the risk of being murdered by
those who, because they think they know us best, consequently admire us
least. Virtue which is waved overhead like a banner is always a
perpetual challenge, and the moment we seem to issue a challenge--even
though we merely challenge the surrounding ether--someone in the concrete
bends down somewhere to pick up a brickbat and, gazing at us, mutters,
"How far? Oh Lord, how far?" Even the expressions of love, in the wrong
place, have been known to hear hatred as their echo. I once knew a man
who left his wife because she could never speak to him without calling
him "darling." She had so absorbed Barrie's theory that the bravest man
is but a "child," that "home" for her husband became a kind of glorified
nursery. At last his spirit became bilious with the cloying sweetness of
it all. The climax came one evening when, after accidentally treading on
her best corn and begging her pardon, she got up, put her loving arms
around his neck and, kissing him, whispered, "_Granted_, darling,
_granted_ before you did it!" Soon after that he left her for a woman
who, herself, trod on every corn he possessed, and had not the least
inclination to say she was sorry. Of course, he lived to regret his
first wife. Most men do.

"Tact," I suppose, is at the bottom of all the difficulty--tact not only
to know instinctively what to do and when to do it, but when to realise
that a wife is still an "audience" and when to realise that, so far as
being completely natural in her company is concerned, she has absolutely
ceased to exist. But, alas! no one has the heart to teach us this
necessary lesson in "tact." We can tell a man of his sin when we dare
not tell him it were the better plan to go right away by himself when he
wish