not mere occasional love-making, that they must achieve in order to be
permanently happy, and comradeship is a relation in which each must be
free to be his or her natural self.

Marriage _can_ be made a cramping thing, and then in time it becomes
almost an insufferable thing. But if each will give the other room to
grow it can be an enlarging experience. It may contain the sum of the
interests of two different people. If mutual learning is brought into
it, it dignifies the lives of both. I believe in obedient wives. But
then I also believe in obedient husbands. If I did not follow my wife's
lead in some departments of life, I should be neither more nor less
than a fool. And I believe that she is quite wise to follow my lead in
some other connections.

What all this really points to is that the element of liberty is worth
conserving within marriage with very great care. When a wife has no
private means it is an essential thing for the husband to give her
regularly a stated allowance and to ask no questions as to how it is
spent. It is a good thing--a very good thing--to make certain that, if
possible, a wife has a holiday now and then from the heavy bondage of
housekeeping. It is even a good thing that she should have a holiday
now and then from the charms and joys of family life. For we men are
very like children in the way we come to depend on our wives. All our
little woes must be brought to them--from buttonless shirts to the
pitiful tale of our last defeat at golf. The children consult them
daily about a hundred things as of right, and their husbands must often
seem to them the biggest bairns of the lot. I quite see why women like
it. But it must get very wearing at times. It surely is a good thing
that now and then a wife should turn her back on it all, meet old
friends, have days in which to enjoy herself without any bothers, and