Made In Heaven.

They say marriages are! Such a discussion I heard the other day, and so eloquent were the speakers and so obviously sincere that it seemed to me necessary to talk about the matter, quietly and sensibly. The theories advocated ranged swiftly and with breathtaking rapidity from a woman's duty to her husband to companionate marriages, free love, and so on. Some rather interesting opinions I gathered—anyhow, it is a subject always of interest and eternally presenting new problems.

This is nothing extraordinary, surely! Yet some presumably normal, intelligent and very self-satisfied men are conservative to the point of incredulity on the matter of marriage. For them, the “old order” must not change, nor shall it give place to “new!” Altogether upsetting, awkward, and not quite respectable. We smile at this childish desire to remain secure, to stay in the cradle. There is no need here to enter into a discussion on modern marriages—although it offers thousands of original and stimulating problems—sufficient is it to say that tremendous changes are taking place—inevitable result of woman's altered status; harvest of those seeds of independence sown so thoroughly in the nineteenth century. The twentieth century wife is someone to be considered; no longer the sweet faithful echo of a patronising, indulgent and omnipotent husband—a tremendous shadowing dominant figure in her life—demanding imperiously her love and her service. “Really, my dear, you know so little about the world how can you be the proper person to judge?” or “Dearest, I wish it!” Blindly, devotedly, she obeyed, she brought up his children, she admired his capabilities, laughed at his jokes, quoted his sentiments to her friends, flattered his vanity by listening so silently to his definite opinions and beliefs. And if by chance he should die before her, be left desolate, frail and dependent, a little shadow of a woman, robbed entirely through many years of happy marriage of her personality, her initiative—her very self sacrificed upon the altar of Hymen.

The modern woman is an independent, self-reliant, thinking individual. Often with ideas quite different from those of her husband—and why not? We do not agree with the poet that—

“Woman is the weaker vessel,
All thy thoughts compared with mine
Are as moonlight unto sunlight,
Or as water unto wine.”

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An arrogant and colossal assumption, most modern men would admit. The wife of to-day is entitled to be herself, to think for herself, and develop her own personality. She is a companion and a helper, can advise and act, can offer more to her children from her greater experience—from her knowledge of life in all its fulness, not a minute, narrow corner of it.

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