It is utterly impossible to have too much of the last-named commodity.

It will be all needed, well-blended with the divine attribute of patience, and judiciously seasoned with woman's especial gift--tact, to enable man and wife to live together peaceably for one year.
Moreover, Mary must understand that John the lover and John the husband have very different ways of showing affection.

The lover would loiter evening after evening waiting for other guests to go home that he might have time for a few tender words with his sweetheart.

Woman's logic reasons,--"what more natural when he has hours of time than for him to keep on saying those same tender words, only very many more of them ?" The fact remains that he does not.

After the kiss of welcome on his arrival home at the close of day, he is unsentimental enough to want his dinner, and, that disposed of, he buries himself behind his newspaper, from which perhaps he does not emerge before nine o'clock when he is ready to talk to Mary and to be entertained by her.
And yet this John of whom I am talking is as good morally, as faithful and conscientious in his manly way as Mary in her womanly.
But--suppose he were not a good man, what then?
Could the mere fact of his union with her change his entire nature?
A good man may be made better by association with a good woman; a man with repressed evil tendencies may have them held more firmly in check by his wife's restraining influence, but no woman should undertake to "make over" a man who has given way to the wicked passions of his being until they are beyond his control.