THE WAY OF A MAN
He carried flowers and diamond rings to please that dazzling belle, and caramels and other things that damsels love so well. He’d sit for hours upon a chair and hold her on his knees; he blew his money here and there, as though it grew on trees. “If I had half what you are worth,” he used to say, “my sweet, I’d put a shawlstrap round the earth and lay it at your feet.”
He had no other thought, it seemed, than just to cheer her heart; and everything of which she dreamed, he purchased in the mart.
“When we are spliced,” he used to say, “you’ll have all you desire—a gold mine or a load of hay, a dachshund or a lyre. My one great aim will be to make your life a thing of joy, so haste and to the altar take your little Clarence boy.”
And so she thought she drew a peach when they were wed in June. Alas! how oft for plums we reach, and only get a prune!
“And so you want another hat?” he thundered to his frau. “Just tell me what is wrong with that—the one you’re wearing now! No wonder that I have the blues, the way the money goes; last week you blew yourself for shoes, next week you’ll want new clothes!
“I wish you were like other wives and would like them behave; it is the object of their lives to help their husbands save. All day I’m in the business fight and strain my heart and soul, and when I journey home at night, you touch me for my roll. You want a twenty-dollar hat, to hold your topknot down, or else a new Angora cat, a lapdog, or a gown. You lie awake at night and think of things you’d like to buy, and when I draw a little chink, you surely make it fly.
“With such a wife as you, I say, a husband has no chance; you pull his starboard limb by day, by night you rob his pants.
“My sainted mother, when she dwelt in this sad vale of tears, had one old lid of cloth or felt, she wore for thirty years. She helped my father all the time, she pickled every bone, and if she had to blow a dime, it made her weep and moan.
“The hat you wear is good as new; ’twill do another year. So don’t stand round, the rag to chew—I’m busy now, my dear.”
