X. VICES AND FOIBLES.

“While the barrooms are full of men the churches are full of women,” said a shrewd observer in one of the daily prints lately. His statement was a broad one, but after all conveys a truth of which women may perhaps be too proud.

They don’t frequent barrooms and similar resorts, to be sure, but then one must remember they don’t want to. They do go to church a good deal, but they take pleasure in doing it. Virtue and vice are, after all, comparative terms, and the temperament of the individual comes in to modify most decisions.

On one of the occasions when I helped to swell the congregation of women at church, I heard what seemed to me a most sensible and rational theory propounded by the preacher. He was talking of the judgment, and he said that the Judge was not going, like an earthly magistrate, to apply an iron law to every case alike, but to consider each culprit’s temperament, opportunities and environment. That seems to me a plan that, if it could be applied in mundane courts of so-called justice, would be productive of far happier results than can now be obtained.

Men, for instance, would not be so severely judged for frequenting barrooms as women would, and a fretful, suspicious, “nagging” woman would not be punished for her flights of temper as a man would be for similar conduct.

Each sex has its own class of faults, and doubtless the temptation to those faults is far stronger in the class which has a sort of hereditary right to them than in any other. They differ essentially, these faults of men and women do, and very often they clash all the more on account of these differences. Man’s wrong tendencies run into vices more or less coarse and degrading, while woman’s tend rather to foibles and faults more or less narrow and contemptible.

In this matter of barrooms, for instance, almost every man thrown into business and political relations with his fellow-men, or who mingles freely with other men of various classes, finds himself very often invited, almost compelled, to drink something with them, and I suppose two-thirds of the men in America are in the habit of doing so. Just why people should invite each other to drink as a sign of good fellowship, or honest intentions, or forgiveness, or amity, is rather a puzzle, especially to the female mind. Why is the process of deglutition a specially social one? Why don’t they invite each other to wash their hands together, or comb their hair, or blow their noses—in fact, any of the familiar functions men perform all the time, just as they drink when they are thirsty and eat when they are hungry?

However, not to spend time in theorizing, we grant the fact that men have a habit of drinking together, and downtown they resort to barrooms for that purpose. I am not writing a temperance lecture and do not say there is any wrong in doing this, but I do say that drunkenness is a vice, and a very disgusting one, and that a habitual drunkard is not a fit or indeed a possible companion for any woman. The vice is one natural to him as a man in our present condition of civilization, especially in great cities, and perhaps a perfectly just and omniscient judge would not condemn him for it half so severely as the woman does who is compelled to suffer from the effects of a vice which is no temptation to her and which she cannot understand.

On the other hand, the woman has her foibles of temper, of selfishness, of jealousy, of vanity, of precision and intolerance.

These qualities are not vices, unless we call jealousy one, but they are capable of making life intolerable to any one compelled to associate intimately with the woman who possesses and develops them.

A man under certain conditions of excitement and provocation is apt to become coarse and brutal. He swears, he bangs the furniture about, he tells his wife she is a fool, or a liar, or a scold, and taunts her with cruel insults.

He visibly, to her eyes if not to his own, steps down from his position as man and gentleman and becomes an object of scorn and loathing.

Now comes in her foibles to fan the flame his vices have kindled. She uses her nimble tongue like a lash, she mimics him, she looks at him, she wishes she had a kodak to take his picture—in fact, she arouses all that is worst in his nature to a condition of frenzy, and after that point anything is possible. He may strike her; he may heap upon her insults so terrible that no penitence can ever wash them away; he may even be so wrought upon by rage and that sense of helplessness which assails a man when a clever woman lets loose her tongue upon him as to lay out his brute strength upon her and lay her dead at his feet. Two men or two women rarely if ever stir each other to such a pitch of irresponsible wrath as that to which an angry woman can drive an angry man.

Or let us impartially reverse the case. One of a woman’s foibles is love of admiration and homage. She has beauty and fascination of manner, and she likes to see their power confessed. Her husband is a jealous man, and at the same time indifferent to those claims in his wife which he was prompt to confess before they became his own property. She seeks amusement and consolation in public and flirts with this or that admirer, rather pleased at finding that she can stir her careless lord to frantic jealousy. If she persists, and from the mere love of power goads and teases him too far, he may break loose from those bonds of morality which every decent man assumes with his marriage vows and go to the bad generally, revenging himself upon his giddy wife by flaunting before her face rivals whose very rivalry is a degradation to her.

Or perhaps her foible is an inordinate precision. Her homo is like a nunnery. Her own apartments are like those of an old maid. She cannot have smoking anywhere in the house because it scents the walls and furniture. She cannot have newspapers or paper novels thrown about on chairs and tables. If the husband, manlike, pushes the furniture this way, and that, throws open a window, and rudely twists the lace draperies like a rope to keep them out of the way, the precise woman replaces everything the moment his hand leaves it—perhaps silently and with a long-suffering air of patient martyrdom, perhaps with a cold and formal request that Mr. So-and-so will not turn her parlors into a caucus room or worse.

The precise woman carries her precision further than the furniture. Her husband, coming home from his all-day association with men, tells his wife what he thinks a good story or a funny jest, or tells what some man has told him about some other man. The precise woman is shocked. Perhaps she ought to be shocked; perhaps she ought to make her husband feel that he has come home to a purer and more refined atmosphere than he has been breathing through the day, but her foible of precision comes in to aggravate his vice of coarseness, and she rebukes him in a cold and bitter fashion that only disgusts and annoys him, instead of acknowledging the fun and then gently and deftly suggesting that it might have been more delicately put; or else by a certain surprised and pained look and a softly breathed “Oh, Ned!” or perhaps with a caress and a whispered word like “Oh, darling, don’t; please don’t”—in one of these ways or in some similar fashion a sweet, natural woman will soon make her husband ashamed of being coarse, at least in her presence, and she will have helped instead of hindering him.

But just so sure as a coarsely-genial man marries a precise and intolerant woman, just so sure is she to drive him from home and from her presence. He may not become unfaithful, as the husband of the flirt does, but he seeks in his hours of leisure the society of other men or of women who, as he puts it, “don’t care what you say to them.” Or he lounges behind the scenes of the theater, or in the stables, or at social assemblages far below his own level—anywhere, in fact, that he can feel free and untrammeled.

I once remonstrated with a man whom I had known before his marriage as a very genial, good-humored fellow, with the capacity for becoming a really charming man.

“Why do you go to such places? Don’t you see that you are letting yourself down terribly? What would your mother have thought if she had heard of your being there last night?” demanded I, with the freedom of long friendship; and he, with a sort of groan, replied:

“I know it; it’s all true; you can’t tell me more than I sometimes tell myself. But what can I do? I’m a fellow that likes a good joke and a jolly laugh, and to let loose generally when business is over and play begun. But you know my wife—that is, you’ve seen her—you couldn’t know unless you lived with her how horribly good she is——”

“Horribly good!” echoed I.

“Yes, just that,” responded my friend. “She’s neat and nice, of course. In fact, I fell in love with her look and air like a white lily, but if I were going to ‘call her pet names, darling,’ now, I’d change White Lily into ‘Ice Woman.’ When I get home at night, I want to throw down my hat and coat, and kick off my boots and unbuckle the armor I’ve worn all day, and ‘lay off’ generally. I want a sweet, loving little woman to come and give me a kiss, and say she’s glad to see me, and ask if I won’t have something to drink—why, I’d be grateful if she offered me a cup of tea even! But, no; it’s ‘Why, John, what a noise you make; and pray don’t throw your hat down on that chair. Have you cleansed your feet on the door mat?’

“Then if I try to tell her a joke, or a story, or something lively, she pinches up her mouth like a vise, and says I insult her, and, oh, dear! I feel just like that fellow who was shut into an iron cell, and saw the walls close in and in upon him till they crushed him flat. I have to get out of it somehow, and you know when a horse kicks over the traces he generally bolts to finish up with.”

A similar foible to this is that of religious intolerance. Almost every man wishes his wife to have some religious belief and practices. In fact, I think a good many men look to their wives to take care of the spiritual concerns of the family, just as they do after the housekeeping or the mending. It is a part of their duty to the marital firm. But a great many women pursue this duty until it becomes a nuisance. They are not content with going to church in season and out of season themselves, but they must drive their husbands thither at the point of the bayonet—that bayonet of their tongue, which they know how to use so fatally.

The young man of the present day is not a church-going animal as a general thing. He will go as a bachelor sometimes on the chance of walking home by the longest way with some pretty girl. He will go while he is engaged because his fiancée wishes him to, and he will go when he is first married as a sort of obligation to “forswear sack and live cleanly” that he has taken upon himself. But after the first year he becomes accustomed to his new dignities, and is very apt when Sunday morning comes round to have “a little headache,” or to feel very tired and in need of a good rest, or to boldly declare that “he’d rather go for a walk out of town.” In fact, he doesn’t want to go to church.

Now is the time when the wife, if she herself is a churchgoer and a religious woman, has the opportunity either to make or mar the happiness of her whole married life. If she is wise, she neither argues, scolds nor sulks over her husband’s indevoutness, but goes her way alone, trusting to time and tact and opportunity, one or the other of which will, if she is patient and sweet and wise, generally give her if not all at least part of what she desires.

But the intolerant woman! Alas, the father of evil must often be gay and glad at seeing his work so well done with godly weapons. Bitter speeches, direful forebodings as to his eternal doom, sneering non-acceptance of excuses, a rigid and frozen air of pharisaic displeasure—all these or even half of them will soon drive a man who began by being careless and indifferent into bitter and honest hatred of religion or any of its practices, and the vices of ribaldry and profanity and blasphemy may spring up a sturdy crop from the seed sown by the foible of intolerance and overrighteousness.

But not to multiply instances, it is, as it seems to me, a broad and general truth that the vices of man and the foibles of woman act and react upon each other with terrible power, and that when one of a married couple finds him or herself confronted by an ill quality in the other, which seems well-nigh intolerable, their first step should be to keenly examine themselves or some vice or foible which acts as an irritant and incentive to the other. The old saying that it takes two to make a quarrel may be amplified to mean that when a married couple lives unhappily the fault is not generally all on one side, and if each party will honestly confess this and make some concessions the breach may be healed, or at least lessened.

As a general rule, men are wanting in tact and adaptability, and women are deficient in tolerance and patience. If both men and women recognized these deficiencies and tried to remedy them, a great deal of matrimonial trouble would be done away with almost imperceptibly, and the marriage car would run upon velvet instead of cobble.

Of course, this general rule has exceptions, and a good many, too.

There are men so absorbed in their own selfish enjoyments, so bound in their own vices, so utterly regardless of the welfare of other persons, that no amount of self-sacrifice on the part of their wives would do anything to soften or elevate them.

There are women so utterly frivolous, shallow and heartless that no magnanimity or unselfish devotion upon the part of a husband could elevate them.

Of such I have nothing to say, and probably nothing but death or some other separation will help their sad case. But in the majority of cases, if a man has vices, let the woman see to it that her foibles do not aggravate them, and vice versa.

“Verbum sapientia sufficit.”