The Birmingham age-herald., 1923-05-12
The Homesick Bride in a Strange
 City
Dorothy Dir
Transpanted Brides Like Flowers Need Patient Care Until
 They Become Acclimated

Not long ago a girl l know got married. It was a gay and lovely wedding. with the little bride sur rounded by the girls and boys with whom she had grown up. And as she drove away amid a shower of confetti and good wishes, there was perhaps a little tinge of envy in the hearts of | some of her bridesmaids as they the ught how thrilling it was to be going away to live in big city. Within three months the little bride was back home again with father and mother. and it was whis- pered that she was trying to divorce her husband No, she hadn't found out any dreadful thing about his past life. He didn't drink; he was moral; he hadn't mistreated her. But he was unsympathetic. He had neglected her and she had simply perished of loneliness.
 And she hadn't the strength to en- dure. She hadn't the grit to stick it out. She hadn't the courage to fight down her ht tmesickness and adjust herself to the new conditions. So she had run back home like cry baby to mother, and instead of mother spanking her. so to speak. and sending her back to do her duty she was pitied and poor thnged" at home. and father set the lawyers to work to find some pretext by which to free her from her matrimonial vows.
 Now it is easy enough to say that such girl is a weakling. Sine is And that a man is lucky to be rid of her. He is. But surely the hus- band signally failed in his duty when he did not help his wife through the bad quarter of an hour when she first came face to face with the realities of her new life, and when he did not assist her to find herself in the new world in which she seemed to have nc place.
 Cold and callous is the man who does not understand what this means to a girl and who does not show her sympathy and understanding at such a time. Selfish to the core is he if he does not make every possible ef- fort to cheer her up, and find for her interests and amusements that will make her days less long and drear.
 Yet there are men who are net in- tentionally unkind, who never stop to think whether they are making their young wives happy or unhappy. They consider that being married to them is all that any woman needs to make her blissful. and so they take their brides to some city where they hap pen to live. and dump them down with nothing to do, and nothing tG think about, and nobody to know, and nowhere to go, and expect them to be perfectly satisfied.
 In reality, there is no more pa thetic figure in the world than that of a bride who is brought perfect stranger to live in strange city. At home she was a person of impor- tance. In the city she is nobody. At home she was figure in the social life. She went to innumerable par ties There was not an hour in the day that some friend was not drop ping in for chat, or she was not going out to do some pleasant thing
 In the strange city she knows no one except few men friends of her husbands. She is as alone during the day as Robinson Crusoe on his desert isle, and she gets so hungry for con versation that she even makes talk with the butcher boy.
 Worst of all, she has nothing to do The brand-new furniture and rugs in the brand new apartment are hope lessly clean. Even the brand-new clothes offer no chance of mendng. There is absolutely nothing to do but tC sit up and think of what mother and the girls are doing, and that if she were back home shed be going
 
 to tea with that one. and they'd stop to dance somewhere else, and 1t would all be so gay and jolly.
 Is it any wonder that she is simply swamped with homesickness, which is the dampest dreariest. most tear full and desolate sickness In the whole range Of soul diseases? All of her dreaming is broken through: her ideal of the happiness of matri- mony is shattered. She has found misery where she looked for bliss and, for the time being. her desola- ton is heart t-breaking and complete.
 Few brides who come as strangers to strange cities escape this martyr dom of loneliness and boredom. One of the happiest married women l know says that for the first three months after she was married she wept perpetually, and that a dozen times she started for the station to go back home. But she fought 1t out and conquered in the end.
 Another woman tells how she hates certain streets because in her bridal