What are you going to do when accounts give your wife a sick headache, so that she cannot possibly attend to them? Are you going to enact the Blue Beard, and rage and storm, and threaten to cut her head off? What good would that do? Cutting off a wrong little head would not turn it into a right one. An ancient proverb significantly remarks, “You can’t have more of a cat than her skin,”—and no amount of fuming and storming can make any thing more of a woman than she is. _Such_ as your wife is, sir, you must take her, and make the best of it. Perhaps you want your own way. Don’t you wish you could get it? But didn’t she promise to obey? Didn’t she? Of course. Then why is it that I must be all the while yielding points, and she never? Well, sir, that is for you to settle. The marriage service gives you authority; so does the law of the land. John could lock up Mrs. Lillie till she learned her lessons; he could do any of twenty other things that no gentleman would ever think of doing, and the law would support him in it. But, because John is a gentleman, and not Paddy from Cork, he strokes his wife’s head, and submits. We understand that our brethren, the Methodists, have recently decided to leave the word “obey” out of the marriage-service. Our friends are, as all the world knows, a most wise and prudent denomination, and guided by a very practical sense in their arrangements. If they have left the word “obey” out, it is because they have concluded that it does no good to put it in,—a decision that John’s experience would go a long way to justify. CHAPTER XIII. _JOHN’S BIRTHDAY._ “MY dear Lillie,” quoth John one morning, “next week Wednesday is my birthday.” “Is it? How charming! What shall we do?” “Well, Lillie, it has always been our custom—Grace’s and mine—to give a grand _fête_ here to all our work-people. We invite them all over _en masse_, and have the house and grounds all open, and devote ourselves to giving them a good time.” Lillie’s countenance fell. “Now, really, John, how trying! what shall we do? You don’t really propose to bring all those low, dirty, little factory children in Spindlewood through our elegant new house? Just look at that satin furniture, and think what it will be when a whole parcel of freckled, tow-headed, snubby-nosed children have eaten bread and butter and doughnuts over it! Now, John, there is reason in all things; _this_ house is not made for a missionary asylum.” John, thus admonished, looked at his house, and was fain to admit that there was the usual amount of that good, selfish, hard grit—called common sense—in Lillie’s remarks.