a wife;
because she hates housework, hates its everlasting routine and ever
recurring duties; because she hates children and will adopt every means to
evade motherhood; because she loves her ease, loves to have her will
supreme, loves, oh how well, to be free to go and come, to let the days
slip idly by, to be absolved from all responsibility, to live without
labor, without care? Will you love her selfish, shirking, calculating
nature after twenty years of close companionship?

2. Do you love him because he is a man, and therefore, no matter how weak
mentally, morally or physically he may {124} be, he has vested in him the
power to save you from the ignominy of an old maid's existence? Because you
would rather be Mrs. Nobody, than make the effort to be Miss Somebody?
because you have a great empty place in your head and heart that nothing
but a man can fill? because you feel you cannot live without him? God grant
the time may never come when you cannot live with him.

[Illustration: AN EARNEST CALLER.]

3. Do you love her because she is a thoroughly womanly woman; for her
tender sympathetic nature; for the jewels of her life, which are absolute
purity of mind and heart; for the sweet sincerity of her disposition; for
her loving, charitable thought; for her strength of character? because she
is pitiful to the sinful, tender to the sorrowful, capable, self-reliant,
modest, true-hearted? in brief, because she is the embodiment of all
womanly virtues?

4. Do you love him because he is a manly man; because the living and
operating principle of his life is a tender reverence for all women;
because his love is the overflow of the best part of his nature; because he
has never soiled his soul with an unholy act or his lips with an oath;
because mentally he is a man among men; because physically he stands head
and shoulders above the masses; because morally he is far beyond suspicion,
in his thought, word or deed; because his earnest manly consecrated life is
a mighty power on God's side?

5. But there always has been and always will be unhappy marriages until men
learn what husbandhood means; how to care for that tenderly matured,
delicately constituted being, that he takes into his care and keeping. That
if her wonderful adjusted organism is overtaxed and overburdened, her
happiness, which is largely dependent upon her health, is destroyed.

6. Until men give the women they marry the undivided love of their heart;
until c