The Dickinson press., 1888-07-28
WOMAN AND HOME.
A MIDDLE AGED WIFE's PATHETIC.
UNEQUAL STRUGGLE.

fic':'in: Up Appearances Warming
.icniia Face Pow.lcrs-Soc,al .,ncric,
il t$'3-"coroms "A Girls Education.
Til" Ni:a;car-Ii"mscl,old Hints.
Most finely organized women are SO sus.
c%ci,tii''r To the quality of the moral atmos.
li,rr" that their very personality alters with
their conditions. They are eloquent in one
rrrSrnr" ard dulnb in another, quite ire
~sl,"rtivc of their likings or dislikincs. In
the warmth of sympathy, of interest and aIe
proval, even i'll the comfortable medium of a
decent civility, they flower ont into variety
and ii gracious agrccableness. In the chile of
indifference or Il tolerant silence, their men.
tai powers shrink into tolpor; they have
nothing to say. and if, from a sense of 10y.
atty to the domestic idea, they try to make
talk, they are tacitly informed that they s,lc.
coed i'll being tircsome.
No unequal struggle is more courageous or
more pathetic than the effort of n middle
aged wifeto conceal from herself that the de
h"nair 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 Mt night with heavy
step and heavier countenance, bidding her a
seant good evening, sitting silent through
dinner, and, by way of post-prandial enter
tainment, falling asleep in his chair, burving
himself in the magazines or spreading out
his business papers and working at them
with n conscious "See how l am ready to
slave myself to death for you!" in every Airt
of the pen, she says to herself and to the
world, where he needs defense) that he is
worn out with work and anxiety, that he is
absorbed in the pious task of providing for
her future md the children's, in case he
should fall Il martyr to his domestic dcvo-
ton, and thnt 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 NAV
have worked. and how much he may have
worried, lie 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, intrcnched
behind which he may comfortably and safely
defy all conjugal md social claims, while she
turns her fatigue into a 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 opprcssor,
infinitely lonely in either case.
1t is right that a man should secure a COM
petence for wife II 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 n future that
may never come, he is guilty of n 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 tho
other. Tic police reports of wife bcatings
and wife tol:mcntings arc too horrible to be
road. But that brutality, born of thought
lcsSness and selfishness, which deprivcs the
wife of the moral oxygen that is her right,
which keeps her in the devitalizcd air of in
difference, is a greater wrong, because the
victim is more sensitive and the tyrant more
Observation-Disclosures Bazaar.