of advice or reproof on
the most indifferent subject is impossible. He has not, to be sure, been
the guilty partner in this morning's encounter; he has said only what is
fair and proper, and she has been unreasonable and cross; but, after
all, the fault is remotely his.

When Enthusius awoke, after marriage, to find in his Hermione in very
deed only a bird, a star, a flower, but no housekeeper, why did he not
face the matter like an honest man? Why did he not remember all the fine
things about dependence and uselessness with which he had been filling
her head for a year or two, and in common honesty exact no more from her
than he had bargained for? Can a bird make a good business-manager? Can
a flower oversee Biddy and Mike, and impart to their uncircumcised ears
the high crafts and mysteries of elegant housekeeping?

If his little wife has to learn her domestic _role_ of household duty,
as most girls do, by a thousand mortifications, a thousand perplexities,
a thousand failures, let him, in ordinary fairness, make it as easy to
her as possible. Let him remember with what admiring smiles, before
marriage, he received her pretty professions of utter helplessness and
incapacity in domestic matters, finding only poetry and grace in what,
after marriage, proved an annoyance.

And if a man finds that he has a wife ill adapted to wifely duties, does
it follow that the best thing he can do is to blurt out, without form or
ceremony, all the criticisms and corrections which may occur to him in
the many details of household life? He would not dare to speak with as
little preface, apology, or circumlocution, to his business-manager, to
his butcher, or his baker. When Enthusius was a bachelor, he never
criticized the table at his boarding-house without some reflection, and
studying to take unto himself acceptable words whereby to soften the
asperity of the criticism. The laws of society require that a man should
qualify, soften, and wisely time his admonitions to those he meets in
the outer world, or they will turn again and rend him. But to his own
wife, in his own house and home, he can find fault without ceremony or
softening. So he can; and he can awake, in the course of a year or two,
to find his wife a changed woman, and his home unendurable. He may find,
too, that unceremonious fault-finding is a game that two can play at,
and that a woman can shoot her arrows with far more precision and skill
than a man.

But the fault