What Are the Wild Wives Saying?

And there you have it from one who knows. Wives without a stitch to wear, bad-tempered husbands, recalcitrant kids—it's all part of the time-worn tradition of the matrimonial pitch-and-toss. First you go up and then you come down.

A kick in the slats rolls you half-seas-under, and another kick in the other slats rolls you back. The husband who took his wife for better or for worse recognises that there's enough of both to balance her and keep her on a fairly even keel. The wife with a bad-tempered husband takes him over the sticks with cunning hand. For horses and husbands are alike in that they both go into captivity for “wheel or whoa.” We offer no apology for shifting the analogy from ships to horses for the followers of both are often on the rocks.

A wise wife gives her “old horse” reasonable rope. She recognises that when questing woman packs her lariat and rides into the backblocks of Bachelordom to rope herself a marital mustang she snatches him raw from the range—wild and woolly and hairyheeled. page 14 page 15 For many a moon before the honeymoon he has nibbled the wild oat of bachelor bliss; he has kicked his heels on the fair fields of freedom. Never has he felt the rein of restraint, nor the spur of necessity, nor the blinkers of Benedict. He is a child of the wild when the silken noose of matrimony falls across his quivering wither. So she gentles him before putting him to serious work. Horses and husbands! The only difference is that the one has to carry as much on two legs as the other carries on four. They both must be broken to whip and spur, to saddle and shaft. How well the wise wife knows that this is where a husband can be made or dismayed. When she sees some other wife's husband who habitually kicks over the traces, paws the carpets, snorts into his feed-bag or lies down on the job, she says to herself that here is a husband who was not handled with the care and cunning that builds bonny Benedicts.