Rock Island daily Argus. (Rock Island, Ill.) 1886-1893, 1888-04-23
UUQiN AM HONE.
A MIDDLE AGED WlFe'S PATHETIC,
UNEQUAL STRUGGLE.

Keeping Up Appearance - Warning
In Is5O-E""nomy--A Girls Education.
The NIghtcap-HousehOId Hints.
Most finely organized women are so sus-
ceptible to the quality 81 the moral atmos-
phere that their very personality alters with
their conditions. They are eloquent in one
presence and dumb in another, quite ire
spective of their likings or dislikings. In
the warmth OF sympathy, Of interest and APP
proval, even in the comfortable medium of a
decent civility, they flower out into variety
and gracious agTeeableness. In the chill of
Indifference or a tolerant silence, their men
tai powers shrink into torpor; they have
nothing to say, and If, from sense Of 10y
atty to the domestic idea, they try to make
talk they are tacitly informed that they sue
coed in being tiresome.
No unequal struggle is more courageous or
more pathetic than the effort of "a middle
aged wife to conceal from herself that the de-
bonair lover OF her prime, her Gratiano, SO
gay, so airy, speaking his infinite deal of
nothing is converted into the silent boor of
her meridian. The tenderer and more con-
scientious the woman, the more ready is she
to excuse, but the more she suffers When
Gratiano comes home at night with heavy
step and heavier countenance, bidding her IA
scant good evening, sitting silent through
dinner, and, by way of post-prandial enter
tainmsnt, falling asleep in his chair, burying
himself in the magazines or spreading out
his business papers and working at them
with a conscious "See how | am ready to
slave myself to death for you'll" in every firt
of TIE pen, she says to herself and to the
world, where he needs defensel that he is
worn out with work and anxiety, that he is
h.. fagI yg,f
her future and the children's, in case he
should fall a martyr to his domestic devo-
ton and that she must not mind his morose-
ness, which is simply nervous exhaustion for
which he is not responsible.
But she is not deceived. She knows that
he owes her something more and higher than
the "heaping up dust from year to year"
She knows that the evenings and Sundays
and the holidays ought TO belong TO them
together, to be used in the building up of the
home, which is SO much more than the house.
She knows that no matter how hard he may
have worked, and how much he may have
worried, he has met pleasant experiences
seen pleasant faces, had some variety of feel
ing in every days round to relieve its monot-
ony, and leave him fresher than any twilight
hour finds her The difference is that he
makes of his WEAKNESS a fortress, intrenched
behind which he may comfortably and safely
defy all conjugal and social claims, while she
turns her fatigue into means of grace, re-
proves herself for self indulgence in longing
to yield to it, and goes out TO do the social
duty that cannot be shirked, or sits reading
or working in the room with her oppressor,
infinitely lonely in either case.
1t is right that a man should secure a com
pstence for wife and child, who without him
might eat the bitter bread of poverty. But
if he cheats their present of all that makes
it worth having, for the sake of future that
may never come, he is guilty of a folly that
is cruelty. They are dependent on him for
their daily joy as much as for their daily
bread. To supply the one, he has no right to
pretend to himself that he may stint the
other. The police reports of wife beatings
and wife tormentings are too horrible to be
read. Bat that brutality born of thought
lessness and seltlshness, which deprives the
wife of the moral oxygen that is her right,
which keeps her in the devitalized air of in
difference, is a greater wrong, because the
victim is more sensitive and the tyrant more
ightened.-Harper's Bazaar.