Page:Side talks with girls (1895).djvu/258

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Side Talks with Girls

sake, she will make her ways your ways, and life will be happier all around.

THAT FILTHY LUCRE

If anybody had told you that you would be stingy to your own wife, you would have cut him dead. And yet, when the summer time passed and the autumn days were over, and the winter bonnets came, it wasn't very nice of you, when she said something about getting a new bonnet, to say, "Why, I thought you had eight or ten bonnets in your trousseau." And I don't think it is very nice in you to ask her to tell you exactly how she spent the household money. A woman, my friend, will economize closely for the man she loves, but that man has no right to conclude that she isn't a partner in the purse. You are wise in giving her a regular sum for her household expenses, but if you are both wise and loving there will be another little purse that you will fill, unasked, for her personal expenses. I say this, and yet the woman I know best said that she never minded asking her husband for money; that she loved him well enough to know that he wouldn't refuse, and that she didn't ask him unless she wanted it. Still, I think if you are a generous-minded man, you will never let your wife ask you for money, and so never