With slightly nervous fingers the Traveling Salesman reached up and
tugged at his necktie as though his collar were choking him suddenly.

"So that's how I learned my table manners," he grinned, "and that's
how I learned to quit cussing when I was mad round the house, and
that's how I learned--oh, a great many things--and that's how I
learned--" grinning broader and broader--"that's how I learned not to
come home and talk all the time about the 'peach' whom I saw on the
train or the street. My wife, you see, she's got a little scar on her
face--it don't show any, but she's awful sensitive about it, and
'Johnny,' she says, 'don't you never notice that I don't ever rush
home and tell _you_ about the wonderful _slim_ fellow who sat next to
me at the theater, or the simply elegant _grammar_ that I heard at the
lecture? I can recognize a slim fellow when I see him, Johnny,' she
says, 'and I like nice grammar as well as the next one, but praising
'em to you, dear, don't seem to me so awfully polite. Bragging about
handsome women to a plain wife, Johnny,' she says, 'is just about as
raw as bragging about rich men to a husband who's broke.'

"Oh, I tell you a fellow's a fool," mused the Traveling Salesman
judicially, "a fellow's a fool when he marries who don't go to work
deliberately to study and understand his wife. Women are awfully
understandable if you only go at it right. Why, the only thing that
riles them in the whole wide world is the fear that the man they've
married ain't quite bright. Why, when I was first married I used to
think that my wife was awful snippety about other women. But, Lord!
when you point a girl out in the car and say, 'Well, ain't that girl
got the most gorgeous head of hair you ever saw in your life?' and
your wife says: 'Yes--Jordan is selling them puffs six for a dollar
seventy-five this winter,' she ain't intending to be snippety at all.