A more or less extended experience as a bread-winner has taught me a
noble charity for men. I used to think that all the head of a family
was good for was to accumulate riches and pay bills, but I am beginning
to think that there is many a martyr spirit hidden away beneath the
business man's suit of tweed. Wife and daughters stand ever before
him, like hoppers waiting for grist to grind. "Give! Give!" is their
constant cry, like the rattle of the upper and nether stones. This
panegyric does not apply to the man who frequents clubs and spends his
money on between-meal drinks and lottery tickets. It applies rather to
the unselfish, hardworking father of a family, who works early and late
to keep his daughters like lilies that have no need to toil, and to
help maintain the ostentation of vain display upon which depends the
social success of a worldly and frivolous wife. It would be far more
to those daughters' credit if they did something in the line of honest
and honorable toil to support themselves, rather than live on the
heart's blood of an unselfish and overworked father; and as for the
wife who exacts the income of a duchess to keep up the silly parade of
Vanity Fair, there may come a day for her, when, shorn of the generous
and loving support of a good husband, and forced to earn her own
livelihood, as the penniless widows of bankrupt men are sometimes
forced to do, she will appreciate, too late, the blessing that Heaven
has taken from her.




XV.

WHAT I'M TIRED OF.