Such are the injunctions of the Japanese authority on female conduct; but happily the practice is better than the precept. There may be, thanks to these teachings, furniture wives, as Lamb calls them, who are of little use beyond filling their places in their households; but human nature breaks even through the cast-iron rules which hold it down, and, the sages and moral guides notwithstanding, there are countless happy homes which are unfortunately less heard of than those in which dissensions are rife for the same reason as that our attention is always more drawn to careers of crime and adventure than to quiet, eventless lives. Had our women become what the old teachers wished them to be, it is certain that we should not have retained our vitality through the centuries of feudalism and burst out after ages of inert isolation into all the vigour and energy of a freshly-sprung nation. It is an indirect tribute to our women that the race has preserved unimpaired those high qualities which have since raised it to its present position among the nations of the world. Japanese wives are gentle, docile, and obedient; but let not the western husbands who groan under petticoat government, imagine that Japanese benedicts always have it their own way, for even in Japan the grey mare is sometimes the better horse, as many a henpecked one knows to his cost. There are termagants and viragoes with us as in other countries; the only difference is that our scolds are not so obtrusive as those of the West, and yet do enough to convince the luckless wight that he has caught a Tartar. Just as the omission of honorifics in Japanese speech is as rude as the use of profane language in English, so the absence of those gentle manners with which we invariably associate our women is an even surer index of coarseness and vulgarity than the violence of a western shrew. The Japanese vixen can therefore, without any roughness of manners, nag and harass her husband quite as effectually, though her methods may be quieter than those of the occidental species. Labouring as she is under many disadvantages, the Japanese wife does not get credit for her good qualities, because she always keeps in the background. Neither she nor her husband ever sings the other’s praises in public; on the contrary, mutual depreciation is the custom. And yet all her efforts are directed to her husband’s cutting a creditable figure among his acquaintances. A good, sensible, tactful wife is a jewel with us no less than with the wise man of yore; and her adroitness covers a multitude of defects in her husband. And for all his brave show, often, as our proverb says, “’tis the hen that tells the cock to crow.” CHAPTER XVI. DIVORCE.