has picked up
helter-skelter. They are the crumbs gathered from the table of the
Uneasy Woman, or worse, of the pharisaical and satisfied woman, from
good and bad books, from newspaper exploitations of divorce and
scandal, from sly gossip with girls whose budget of marital wisdom is
as higgledy-piggledy as her own.

And a pathetically trivial budget it is:--

"He must _tell_ her everything." "He must always pick up what she
drops." "He must dress for dinner." "He must remember her birthday."
That is, she begins her adventure with a set of hard-and-fast
rules,--and nothing in this life causes more mischief than the effort
to force upon another one's own rules!

That marriage gives the finest opportunity that life affords for
practicing, not rules, but principles, she has never been taught.
Flexibility, adaptation, fair-mindedness, the habit of supplementing
the weakness of the one by the strength of the other, all the fine
things upon which the beauty, durability, and growth of human
relations depend,--these are what decide the future of her marriage.
These she misses while she insists on her rules; and ruin is often the
end. Study the causes back of divorces and separations, the brutal
criminal causes aside, and one finds that usually they begin in
trivial things,--an irritating habit or an offensive opinion persisted
in on the one side and not endured philosophically on the other; a
petty selfishness indulged on the one side and not accepted humorously
on the other,--that is, the marriage is made or unmade by small, not
great, things.

It is a lack of any serious consideration of the nature of the
undertaking she is going into which permits her at the start to accept
a false notion of her economic position. She agrees that she is being
"supported"; she consents to accept what is given her; she even
consents to ask for money. Men and society at large take her at her
own valuation. Loose thinking by those who seek to influence public
opinion has aggravated the trouble. They start with the idea that she
is a parasite--does not pay her way. "Men hunt, fish, keep the cattle,
or raise corn," says a popular writer, "for women to eat the game, the
fish, the meat, and the corn." The inference is that the men alone
render useful service. But neither man nor woman eats of these things
until the woman has prepared them. The theory that the man who raises
corn does a more important piece of work than the woman who makes it
in