Marion Harland

The Secret of a Happy Home Marion Harland

Book Excerpt: ...s some grave faults, and one or two incurable disabilities. Grappling, forthwith, with the most obstinate of these last--I name it boldly. John is not--he never can be--and would not be if he could--a woman. Taking into consideration the incontrovertible truth that nobody but a woman ever understood another woman--the situation is serious enough. So desperate in fact, that every mother's daughter of the missionary sex is fired with zealous desire to mend it, and chooses for a subject her own special John--in esse or in posse. This may sound like badinage, but it is uttered in sad earnest. The wife's irrational longing to extract absolute sympathy of taste, opinion and feeling, from her wedded lord, is a baneful growth which is as sure to spring up about the domestic hearth as pursley--named by the Indian, "the white man's foot"--to show itself about the squatter's door. Once rooted it is as hard to eradicate as plantain and red sorrel. I brand it as "irrational," because common...