“No, m’m, but if you could just mention it to him--you see it takes me all the evening to mend them when I ought to be getting on with the new curtains.” It was just as if she had said: “Of course, it is a pity he shouldn’t enjoy himself, and I would be the last to wish to stop it, but we can’t let his play stand in the way of what has to be done.” The idea of a wife being the mother of her husband is an old one, but it has been too ambiguously put before the public, therefore girls still marry under a misapprehension. The misapprehension is of no consequence and hurts no one, but I cannot help thinking it would save disappointment if instead of nursing a delusion we could idealise a fact. If children were not made unnecessarily ridiculous the supposed husband would not be missed from the family group. If Mrs. Beehive gave to her younger children some of the dignity which she has, by reason of her nature, stripped from Mr. Beehive it would be a great deal better than throwing it away, and Mr. Beehive would suffer less from being placed in the same pigeon-hole with his own baby. Why should the mother of the family be the only one who is allowed any dignity or private life? She denies this, of course, and draws you a beautiful fancy picture of papa, the head of the house. She dresses him up for your benefit in all his war-paint of waistcoat and whiskers, but she does it in just the same spirit as she dresses up her son as a postman to please him while she gets on with her work. And the cruel thing is that she has so long ago stripped him of his natural fur and feathers that when she says “that is enough,” and folds away the waistcoat and whiskers in a drawer, he is exposed to the neighbours in a defenceless and absurd condition. What is it that binds Mr. and Mrs. Beehive together? The problem has fidgeted me for years. It has disturbed me in my work, and sometimes even caused me to overlook Mr. Jones’s iniquities until it was too late to do anything. I once asked Ruth why it is that married people remain with one another, and she said she supposed it was the evenings. “What about the evenings?” I asked. “Well, you see, m’m,” she said, “as you know yourself, there is not very much for unmarried girls as is anyways respectable to do in the evenings.” “Yes, but the men, Ruth,” I said,“--mind the milk--it is boiling--thank you--why do they stay to be treated like children?” “Well, m’m, I suppose it is because they are what you might call childish. Of course, you may say they do bring in the money, and some of them are very knowledgeable--such as master--but you’ll find they haven’t much idea of spending an evening profitably without they are married.”