Of course there is a healthy demanding as well as an unhealthy demanding, but, so far as I know, the healthy demanding can come only when we are clear of personal resistance and can demand on the strength of a true principle and without selfish emotion.

There is a kind of gentle, motherly contempt with which some women speak of their husbands, which must get on a man's nerves very painfully.

It is intensely and most acutely annoying.
And yet I have heard good women speak in that way over and over again.
The gentleness and motherliness are of course neither of them real in such cases.

The gentle, motherly tone is used to cover up their own sense of superiority.
"Poor boy, poor boy," they may say; "a man is really like a child." So he may be--so he often is childish, and sometimes childish in the extreme.

But where could you find greater and more abject childishness than in a woman's ungoverned emotions?
A woman must respect the manliness of her husband's soul, and must cling to her belief in its living existence behind any amount of selfish, restless irritability, if she is going to find a friend in him or be a friend to him.