different from the lover, and
spends her days in impotent whining. She is always being neglected,
and always taking offence; she has an insatiable craving for
attentions, and needs continual assurances of affection, wasting her
time and feelings in getting up pathetic scenes of accusation, which
finally weary, and then alienate her husband. Her own fault! There is
nothing a man hates more than a woman going sobbing and complaining
about the house with red eyes; unless it be a woman with whom he must
live in a perpetual fool's paradise of perfection.

There are also discontented wives, who goad their husbands into
extravagant expenditure, and urge them to projects from which they
would naturally recoil. There are others, whose social ambitions slay
their domestic ones, and who strain every nerve, in season and out of
season, and lose all their self-respect, for a few crumbs of
contemptuous patronage from some person of greater wealth than their
own. Some wives fret if they have no children, others just as much if
children come. In the first case, they are disappointed; in the
second, inconvenienced; and in both, discontented. Some lead
themselves and others wretched lives because they have not three times
as many servants as are necessary; a still greater number because they
cannot compass a life of constant amusement and excitement.

A very disagreeable kind of discontented woman is the wife who,
instead of having a God to love and worship, makes a god of her
religion, alienates love for an ecclesiastical idea, or neglects
her own flesh and blood to carry the religious needs of the world;
forgetting that the good wife keeps her sentiments very close to her
own heart and hearth. But perhaps the majority of discontented wives
have no special thing to complain of; they fret because they are
"so dull." If they took the trouble to look for the cause of this
"dulness," they would find it in the want of some definite plan of
life, and some vigorous aim or object. Of course any aim implies
limitation, but limitation implies both virtue and pleasure. Without
rule and law, not even the games of children could exist, and the
more strictly the rules of a game are obeyed, the greater the
satisfaction. A wife's duty is subject to the same conditions. If
aimless, plaintive women would make strict laws for their households,
and lay out some possible vigorous plan for their own lives, they
would find that those who love and work have