If he wishes, as he often does, to protect his wife from the elder lady's violence or bad temper he runs the risk of being denounced to the neighbours--and perhaps to the local magistrate--as an unfilial son; if he weakly and reluctantly takes his mother's side in a domestic disagreement, or if--as is much more frequently the case--he pretends to shut his eyes altogether to the quarrels of his women-folk, the wife of his bosom may in a moment of anger or despair run away from him or commit suicide. The only source of comfort to a young wife who is unfortunate enough to displease her husband's mother is that some day, in the course of nature, she herself will be in the proud position of a mother-in-law. If she is of a cantankerous or tyrannical disposition, or if her temper has been soured by her own domestic troubles, she will then doubtless treat her son's wife with just as little kindness as she received in her own early days of wifehood, and her daughter-in-law will fear and dislike her just as she herself feared and disliked her own husband's mother. Fortunately there are good and benevolent mothers-in-law in Weihaiwei as well as bad ones: and it is only fair to add that it is not always the wife who is meek and submissive and the mother-in-law who wields the iron rod. Sometimes a high-spirited and obstinate young woman will become absolute ruler of the household--including her husband and his parents--before she has lived a month in her new home, though her tenure of authority will always be somewhat precarious until she has given birth to her first son. "Why do you run away from a woman?" I once asked an unhappy husband whose domestic troubles had driven him to the courts. "Is she not your wife, and can you not make her obey you?" The young man's features broadened into a somewhat mirthless smile as he replied, "I am afraid of her. Eight men out of ten are afraid of their wives." Women, indeed, are at the root of a large proportion of the cases heard in the courts. No insignificant part of the duty of a magistrate in Weihaiwei consists in the taming of village shrews. The number of such women in China is much larger than might be supposed by many Europeans, who regard the average Chinese wife as the patient slave of a tyrannical master. The fact is that Chinese women, in spite of their compressed feet and mincing gait, rule their households quite as effectually as women do in countries further west, and in the lower classes they frequently extend the sphere of their masterful activity to their neighbours' houses as well. The result is not always conducive to harmony. "For ther-as the womman hath the maistrie," wrote one of the keenest students of human nature many centuries ago, "she maketh to muche desray; ther neden none ensamples of this. The experience of day by day oghte suffyse." This is a statement that multitudes of woebegone husbands in Weihaiwei, were they readers of Chaucer, would readily endorse.