Wichita eagle., 1888-07-20
9ailY Eas1e
WOMAN AND HOME.
A MIDDLE AGED WifE'S PATHETIC,
UNEQUAL STRUGGLE

Keeping Up Appearances - Warning
Against Face Powden-Social America
in I850-Economy-A Girls Education.
The NiGhtcap-Household Hints.
Most finely organized women are SO sus-
ceptible to the quality of the moral atnos-
phere that their very personality alters with
their conditions They are eloquent in one
presence and dumb in another, quite ire
spectiye Of their Hkings or dislikings In
the warmth Of sympathy, Of interest and ap-
proral, even in the comfortable medium of a
decent civility, they flower out into variety
and gracious agreeableness. In the chill Of
Indifference or tolerant silence their men
tai powers shrink into torpor: 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 sue
ceed in being tiresome.
No unequal struggle is more courageous or
more pathetic than the effort OF q 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 msridian. The tenderer and more con-
scientious the woman, the more ready is she
10 excuse, Out Tue more she suffers. w zen
Gratiano comes home at night with heavy
step and heavier countenance, bidding her
scant good evening, sitting silent through
dinner, and, by way of post-prandial enter
tainment, falling asleep in his chair, burying
himself in the magazines or spreading out
his business papers and working at them
with conscious '.See how l am ready to
slave myself to death for your in every firt
of the pen, she says to herself land 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 and the children's, in case he
should fall martyr to his domestic devo-
ton, and that she must not mind his morose-
pess, which is simply nervous exhaustion for
which be is not responsible.
But she is not deceived She knows that
be 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 10 them
together, to be used in the building up OF the
home, which is so much more than TIE house
She knows that no matter how hard he may
have worked, and how much he NAV have
worried, he has met pleasant experiences,
seen pleasant faces, had some variety Of feel
ing in every days round to relieve It's monot-
ony, and leave MIN 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 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 oppresSor,
infinitely lonely in either case.
1t is right that man should secure CON-
petence for wife and child, who without him
might eat the bitter bread of poverty. But
If he cheats their present Of all that makes
il worth having, for the sake of a future that
may never come, he is guilty of q 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 ne may stint the
other. The police reports of wife beatings
and wife tormentings are too horrible TO 10
read But that brutality, horn of thought
lessneSs and selfishness, which deprives the
wife Of the moral oxygen that is her right,
which keeps her IN the devitaiized air of in
difference, is greater wrong, because the
victim is more sensitive and the tyrant more
nhghtened-Harpers Bazaar.