f dust and disorder which characterizes bachelor
housekeeping, and which seldom disturbs the equanimity of the masculine
mind in the least. Men and women are so different in their tastes and
ways that there must always be discord and unhappiness in the household
until the sexes give over trying to change or remodel those tastes and
ways, and learn to respect them. Men must accept as inevitable the fact
that women to be happy must have artistic, or at least dainty and cozy,
environments; and women must learn to preserve their souls in quiet when
men spill their tobacco and ashes over the carpets and tables, for
probably no man ever lived who could fill a pipe, even from a wash-tub,
without scattering the tobacco over the premises.

That the sexes will give over trying to reform each other does not seem
likely to happen very soon. Indeed, one might be pardoned for believing
that matrimony is specially adapted to develop all the imperfections
and meannesses of human character, and that even of those matches that
are made in heaven the devil arranges all the subsequent conditions.
There is hardly a pure and innocent delight that unmarried women enjoy
which they can carry into that blissful world bounded by the
marriage-ring. One of those delights is that of squandering a little
money, which is merely the equivalent of man's spending it as he likes,
without accounting to any one. Few wives can do this and not be
subjected to the humiliation of hearing the husband say, "My dear, are
you not a little extravagant? Is all that money gone that I gave you
last week?"

Men and women seem incapacitated, in the very nature of things, from
understanding each other. While mutually enamored they meet as upon a
bridge--a Bridge of Sighs perhaps: break this, and they are for ever
separated as by an impassable gulf. Leaving aside entirely the enamored
state, do men as a rule seek the society of women and prefer it to that
of men? The thriving clubs, the billiard- and drinking-saloons, and the
other resorts of men common all over the civilized world, seem very like
a negative answer to the question. In savage life we know that the sexes
do not hunt or fish or do any work together. In our modern drawing-rooms
most men confess themselves "bored." They long to get away to their
clubs or some other resort of their fellows. When husbands spend their
evenings at home, if no one happens to call it is not common for them to
enter into long and exh