The six wives described in this little book are types which exist all over the Christian world.
They may be found everywhere, save in the Orient.
This does not signify that the unselfish, tactful, tender and worthy woman is not in the foreground in the picture of life.
She is.
But her virtues, her nobility, and her ofttimes sorrow, have all been so frequently depicted, that many women who are the creators of their own misfortunes, fall into the error of believing they belong to her class.
It is the writer's impression, based on observation, that a larger number of men marry for love than do women.
Just why so many men who begin married life with love and ideals, end it by being bad husbands, needs a wider and more careful analysis than this little book gives.
But it can do no good wife any harm to study herself, and in reading these pages, try and discover if she appears therein.
The noblest study of womankind is herself.
THE AUTHOR.
I
The first bad husband had been a very good man until he married. He had built up a successful business and a fair name for himself, and he had done it all without help, and without harming any one else.
He climbed without pulling others down; and he did little acts of kindness as he went along, never hesitating to give a dollar where he felt it was needed, even when anxious about the coming of another dollar to fill its place.
He helped indigent relatives; he aided a widowed cousin to educate her daughter, and always remembered the children in his neighbourhood at Christmas time.
And when he was thirty-two, he decided to settle down and have a home of his own. He married a young woman who had distinguished herself as a bright scholar at college, and he took her away from the drudgery of the schoolroom, where she had been teaching for two years after she graduated. He placed her in a pretty home, and gave her every comfort and all his love and attention.
The wife kept the home in good order, and seemed to be very well satisfied with her condition for a time. When people praised her husband for what he had accomplished alone and with no help, rising from the ranks, as it were, to a place of influence in life's army, she smiled and showed satisfaction.
But after a year passed by she began to wish her husband had acquired more polish—that he had enjoyed better advantages—and she found herself irritated by his manners and his speech.
It pleased her immensely when any one spoke of her as 'a superior woman.' She related such compliments to her husband; and he, too, was pleased, and told her how fortunate he was to have won a wife of such intellectual brilliancy.
Ofttimes he repeated similar compliments to her; telling how proud he felt when other people recognised his good luck. But, little by little, the pride of the husband abated; and just in proportion to the growing self-satisfaction of the wife. As she talked more, he talked less; he grew taciturn; his speech became halting, and his manner constrained.
They had been married five years when this supposedly good and moral husband displayed his badness. He brought home a gift to his wife—one he had thought would give her pleasure. She took great pride in her house, and loved to decorate it with odd and beautiful things.
So he had seen this vase in a window and brought it to her, with almost the vanished look of pleasure in his recently lined face.