Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill HUSBANDS AND WIVES WHEN Matilda Hewson married Willis it was a surprise to her friends. She met him in Tangier. Her friends did not know him, and do not know him yet. She and Willis live somewhere in the Sudan, where Willis has a job. I am not sure it is a lucrative job. I suspect it isn't. Very likely thejr live in a tent and herd ostriches, but sometimes when Matilda gets within reach of pen and ink she writes to her relatives and old friends. One of them quotes her as saying in a recent letter : "After all, I could not have married any man but Willis." Bear in mind that she was brought up in easy circumstances, and was inured from childhood to philharmonic concerts, the opera, the assemblies, the newest books, the society of the intellectually inclined, and periodical pilgrimages beyond the seas, so that a nomadic life in the Sudan is a change for her. Understand also that she is a person of such uncommon attractions that, as an old friend said: " When she married Willis she was virtually engaged to one admirable man, and had three or four others hanging around waiting for a vacancy, so that she couldn't have fallen out of a third-story window without dropping into the clutches of a husband at least six times more desirable on economic grounds than Willis was." And yet she writes, as the fruit of reflection and experience, and possibly of fasting, that there was no possible man for her but Willis. There's a good wife ! That is the proper attitude. Once the husband is acquired, the more inextricably he is confounded with destiny the better. Make the mystery of choice seem to vindicate itself, and the mere fact that it is impenetrable can avail nothing for its disparagement. The great general rule about husbands from the standpoint of wives is—make the best of them. Eve...