Is it necessary to advocate the cultivation of the most perfect courtesy between you? Not at first possibly, but it certainly will be. The time may even come when Perseus may raise his voice and roar out his disapproval of Persephone. A certain type of man always shouts when annoyed, not at his friends or clients of course; merely to his clerks and his servants and his wife and the people who are afraid of him. This was a nasty habit of our grandfathers--modern wives are hardly meek enough to stand much of it. However, if Perseus by some freak of atavism ever should so far forget himself in this way, Persephone will find the Biblical soft answer more efficacious than the loudest returning volume of sound. To speak in an exaggeratedly gentle voice always shames the shouter of either sex into silence. Courtesy is more necessary between husband and wife than in any other relation in life. A great deal of bitterness would be saved if this were studiously remembered. Nothing is more painful than to hear a married couple _being rude_ to one another, and the claims of courtesy would prevent all sorts of remarks that belong to the category of the better-left-unsaid. Women, especially, have sometimes a most objectionable habit of hurling home-truths at their husband’s head whenever temper runs a little high; and most men are sensitive enough under their shield of cultivated indifference to resent this acutely, and remember stinging sentences of this kind for years. The fact that they are generally pointedly true does not make them less objectionable. Some wives who are in reality devoted to their husbands, nevertheless make a point of invariably belittling them in private and public, and, though he would rarely admit it, this takes the heart out of a man more than one unversed in the hearts of men could possibly believe. The truth is, men like admiration and praise just as much as women do, though it is part of their strange code to conceal this. They resent a snub just as bitterly as a woman does; why shouldn’t they?