her, let her be grandmother, mother, or maiden aunt. Even the
proverbial mother-in-law grows less difficult as our attitude toward
her is relieved of the strain of detesting everything she does, and
expecting to detest everything that she is going to do. With every
trying friend we have, if we yield to him in all minor matters we
find the settling of essential questions wonderfully less difficult.

A son had a temper and the girl he married had a temper. The mother
loved her son with the selfish love with which so many mothers
burden their children, and thought that he alone of all men had a
right to lose his temper. Consequently she excused her son and
blamed her daughter-in-law. If there were a mild cyclone roused
between the two married people the son would turn to his mother to
hear what a martyr he was and what misfortune he had to bear in
having been so easily mistaken in the woman he married. Thus the
mother-in-law, who felt that she was protecting her poor son, was
really breeding dissension between two people who could have been
the best possible friends all their lives.

The young wife very soon became ashamed of her temper and worked
until she conquered it, but it was not until her mother-in-law had
been out of this world for years that her husband discovered what he
had lost in turning away from his wife's friendship, and it was only
by the happy accident of severe illness that he ever discovered his
mistake at all, and gained freedom from the bondage of his own
temper enough to appreciate his wife.

If, however, the wife had yielded in the beginning not only to her
husband's bad temper but also to the antagonism of her
mother-in-law, which was, of course, annoying in many petty ways,