your mother-in-law, you're a
comparative stranger to your wife. After you and Helen have lived
together for a year, you ought to be so well acquainted that she'll
begin to believe that you know almost as much as mamma; but during the
first few months of married life there are apt to be a good many tie
votes on important matters, and if mother-in-law is on the premises
she is generally going to break the tie by casting the deciding vote
with daughter. A man can often get the best of one woman, or ten men,
but not of two women, when one of the two is mother-in-law.

When a young wife starts housekeeping with her mother too handy, it's
like running a business with a new manager and keeping the old one
along to see how things go. It's not in human nature that the old
manager, even with the best disposition in the world, shouldn't knock
the new one a little, and you're Helen's new manager. When I want to
make a change, I go about it like a crab--get rid of the old shell
first, and then plunge right in and begin to do business with the new
skin. It may be a little tender and open to attack at first, but it
doesn't take long to toughen up when it finds out that the
responsibility of protecting my white meat is on it.

You start a woman with sense to making mistakes and you've started her
to learning common-sense; but you let some one else shoulder her
natural responsibilities and keep her from exercising her brain, and
it'll be fat-witted before she's forty. A lot of girls find it mighty
handy to start with mother to look after the housekeeping and later to
raise the baby; but by and by, when mamma has to quit, they don't
understand that the butcher has to be called down regularly for
leaving those heavy ends on the steak or running in the shoulder chops
on you, and that when Willie has the croup she mustn't give the little
darling a stiff hot Scotch, or try to remove the phlegm from his
throat with a button-hook.

There are a lot of women in this world who think that there's only one
side to the married relation, and that's their side. When one of them
marries, she starts right out to train her husband into kind old
Carlo, who'll go downtown for her every morning and come home every
night, fetching a snug little basketful of money in his mouth and
wagging his tail as he lays it at her feet. Then it's a pat on the
head and "Nice doggie." And he's taught to stand around evenings,
retrieving her gloves and handkerchief, and