uestion of my having attained unto it--with the maturing of this new
breed of hens?

For all spiritual purposes, that is, for all satisfactions, the ideal
hen is the pullet--the Buff Plymouth Rock pullet.

Just so the ideal wife. If we could only keep them pullets!

The trouble we husbands have with our wives begins with our marrying
them. There is seldom any trouble with them before. Our belief in
feminine perfection is as profound and as eternal as youth. And the
perfection is just as real as the faith. Youth is always bringing the
bride home--to hang her on the kitchen clothes-dryer. She turns out to
be ordinary cheese-cloth, dyed a more or less fast black--this
perfection that he had stamped in letters of indelible red!

The race learns nothing. I learn, but not my children after me. They
learn only after themselves. Already I hear my boys saying that their
wives--! And the oldest of these boys has just turned fourteen!

Fourteen! the trouble all began at fourteen. No, the trouble began
with Adam, though Eve has been responsible for much of it since. Adam
had all that a man should have wanted in his perfect Garden.
Nevertheless he wanted Eve. Eve in turn had Adam, a perfect man! but
she wanted something more--if only the apple tree in the middle of the
Garden. And we all of us were there in that Garden--with Adam thinking
he was getting perfection in Eve; with Eve incapable of appreciating
perfection in Adam. The trouble is human.

"Flounder, flounder in the sea,
Prythee quickly come to me!
For my wife, Dame Isabel,
Wants strange things I scarce dare tell."

"And what does she want _now_?" asks the flounder.

"Oh, she wants to _vote_ now," says the fisherman.

"Go home, and you shall find her with the ballot," sighs the flounder.
"But has n't she Dustless-Dusters enough already?"

It would seem so. But once having got Adam, who can blame her for
wanting an apple tree besides, or the ballot?

'T is no use to forbid her. Yes, she has you, but--but Eve had Adam,
too, another perfect man! Don't forbid her, for she will have it
anyhow. It may not turn out to be all that she thinks it is. But did
you turn out to be all that she thought you were? She will have a bite
of this new apple if she has to disobey, and die for it, because such
disobedience and death are in answer to a higher command, and to a
larger life from within. Eve's discovery that Adam was cheese-cloth,
and her