Food, as a fact, is one of the chief sources of friction in married life. It sounds farcical, but I am perfectly serious. Food, the ordering and cooking of it and the subsequent paying for it, is one of the great tragedies of a wife’s existence. Time, the great healer, mercifully deadens the intensity of this anguish, and matrons of fifty or so can face the daily burden of food-ordering with something like indifference. But to a woman who has not yet reached the fatal landmark aptly described as ‘the same age as everybody else, namely, thirty-five,’ it is the greatest cross, whilst many a bride has had her early married life totally ruined by the horrid and ever recurring necessity of finding food for her partner. Men make fun of women because their dinner, when alone, so often consists of an egg for tea, but women have such a constitutional hatred of food-ordering, inherited, no doubt, from a long line of suffering female ancestry, that the majority of them would gladly live on tea and bread-and-butter for the rest of their lives sooner than face the necessity of daily meditating on a menu. For this reason I believe vegetarian husbands are particularly desirable, since the whole principle of food-reform is simplicity. Those who go in for it acquire an entirely fresh set of ideas on the importance of food, and become quite pathetically easily pleased. I know a woman whose husband is a vegetarian and she declared that the food question, so disturbing a factor in most homes, had never caused her a single tear, or frown, or angry word, or added wrinkle. She assured me that her husband would cheerfully breakfast off a banana, lunch off a lettuce, dine on a date and sup on a salted almond. When the house was upset on the occasion of a large evening party and there were no conveniences for the ordinary family dinner, the creature actually ate cheese sandwiches in the bathroom, by way of a dinner, and was quite pleased to do so, moreover! I could scarcely credit it at first, but it was really true. Of the many paltry little causes for friction in married life incompatibility of temperature has doubtless been a very fruitful source of dissension. If one shivers when the window is opened and the other is a fresh-air faddist and can’t breathe with it shut, an endless vista of possibilities of unhappiness is opened out. It was, I believe, Napoleon’s second wife, Marie Louise, who always got rid of her husband when she wished to, by merely keeping her apartments cold. The great man was only comfortable in a very hot room with a blazing fire.