no conveniences for
the ordinary family dinner, the creature actually ate cheese sandwiches
in the bathroom, by way of a dinner, and was quite pleased to do so,
moreover! I could scarcely credit it at first, but it was really true.

Of the many paltry little causes for friction in married life
incompatibility of temperature has doubtless been a very fruitful source
of dissension. If one shivers when the window is opened and the other is
a fresh-air faddist and can't breathe with it shut, an endless vista of
possibilities of unhappiness is opened out. It was, I believe,
Napoleon's second wife, Marie Louise, who always got rid of her husband
when she wished to, by merely keeping her apartments cold. The great man
was only comfortable in a very hot room with a blazing fire.

That grievous deficiency, no sense of humour, is another of the tiny
little rocks on which married happiness often splits. This is natural
enough, since an absence of this priceless quality is about the worst
deprivation a traveller on life's journey can suffer from. Among men the
conviction is rife that women invariably suffer thus, but I think we can
afford to leave them this delusion, since it affords them so much
satisfaction. At one time I had a journalist friend of a painfully
stodgy and unusually depressing literary habit. This poor soul fancied
his vein was humour, and from him I have often endured the reading aloud
of the dreariest laboured pages of japes and jests, which to his
thinking were sparkling with wit. My patient, long-suffering listening
only brought bitter derision for my alleged lack of humorous perception,
but my criticism inspired the young man to write a cynical article on
'Women and Humour,' of the kind that editors--being men--delight in,
and for which he consequently got well paid.

As a fact, the things that amuse men frequently fail to amuse women and
_vice versa_ but it is surely illogical to deduce from this that women's
humorous sense is inferior to men's--or non-existent. As, however, this
apparently insignificant question is of such importance in life
generally, whether it be in a palace, a convent, a villa or a
workhouse--I think a wife would be well-advised to assume amusement if
she feels it not, laugh with her lord even when she doesn't see the
point, and cultivate indifference when he fails to laugh with her.

Writers on marriage seem to have paid very little attention to this
important point. Stevenson is on