But since nature, in the interest of the race, often makes opposites attractive to each other, one may find a husband, full of feeling, who loves children, united to a wife for whom science is the greatest value of life, while she relegates feeling to a lower plane and considers motherhood an animal function. In place of the tenderness and of the children for which the husband longed, he has to participate in the victories and defeats of a woman of science. Or we see a wife who dreamed of an intimate life with her husband and who sacrificed her work to it; but the life together was wrecked upon the husband’s artist concentration, and the wife had to suffer under a twofold emptiness: the lack of her work and the lack of happiness. Then one sees instances where the wife retained her work because it was economically necessary and because she hoped out of the richness of her young strength to be able to fulfil all duties. And all this she was able to do except one thing—to preserve under the excessive strain her beauty, her power of charm, the elasticity of her nature. Perhaps she belonged to the very highest among the new women who are so undivided, so proud, who think so highly of themselves, of man, of love, that they are beyond a wholly justified coquetry and rest blindly upon the uniting power of spiritual congeniality. But the day comes perhaps when these strong and, in all other respects, wise women have nothing other than freedom to give to the man whose senses, whose fancy, need that charm which the wife no longer possesses. In case, however, the man’s nature is not of those for whom the silken threads of daily domestic comfort form the strong band, but on the contrary is of the sort which needs renewal, then the very absence of the wife, occasioned temporarily by the work, can keep the relationship long fresh. This is upon the assumption that she understands what some of these women do not understand: to give, but in such a way that the man always longs for more; to remain sweetheart, not only friend; to be able to jest, not only to talk seriously. The modern wife of to-day, tested upon so many subjects, is often deeply mistaken in regard to the _kind_ of “ministry” the man needs. The simple wisdom of their grandmothers consisted in this: to give much and to require nothing, always to subordinate themselves to the man with gentleness and humility, never to assert themselves before him as a free, self-determining personality. The wives of to-day, sacredly convinced of the right and freedom of women, succeed better in asserting their personality than in pleasing their husbands, and the quantity of their demands is often more noteworthy than the quality of their gifts. That many modern marriages turn out well shows that the adaptability of the modern husband is beginning to be even as great as that of the wife in former times!