Willmar Tribune

The First Requisite
of Love

[Original.]

But some year had passed since they were married, one year spent in brief periods of happiness interspersed with periods of misery. He had found marriage a failure and must make the best of it. He resumed his place at his clubs. This is man's advantage. If he does not find companionship at home, he can get it abroad.

It was not so with the wife. She could not thus coolly make up her mind that there had been a mistake and partly resume her former life of independence. Instead of gathering about her her former friends, practically avoiding any serious pitfall, she listened to the first man who chose to whisper a soft word in her ear, and he, being encouraged, poured forth a torrent.

This in a measure supplied what she had lost. It was like being widowed and exchanging hearts anew.

It was the anniversary of their wedding, but the husband had forgotten it. When the wife discovered that this first anniversary, which a year before he supposed would be passed in a more intense cooing than before, was absolutely unremembered by her husband, she gave way to irritation.

Nothing that he said pleased her. Everything displeased her. "This is one of her moods," he said to himself. "I don't understand them, and I don't want to understand them. I know a place where I can get quiet and comfort, a place where no woman may enter—my club. There I will go."

When he returned at 11 o'clock at night, the new source from which his wife had begun to draw the sympathy she could not live without was sitting in his parlor. The husband, entering suddenly, caught a look that was passing between the two and believed that his place was supplied.

A philosophic nature led him to think out a plan and follow it—a plan that would do the least harm, give him and his wife the least trouble. "I shall be no 'dog in the manger,'" he said. "If she prefers this man, she shall have all she wants of him. I will go abroad and live. But that my affairs shall not become common talk I must have an ostensible object in going. I will apply for some petty consulship in a place where no American would care to live; then I will live elsewhere and pay a deputy."

After he had given himself plenty of time to form an irrevocable resolution he went to announce it to his wife.

We are creatures of happenings. We mark out a course, take a week, a month, perhaps a year to digest it, then when we are ready to put it into execution a circumstantial zephyr blows it away. When the husband was about to communicate his plan to his wife, she forestalled the announcement by one of her own. The germ of a new life had come into the universe.

In a twinkling the man's mind, intentions, affections were diverted into a new channel. He was enough of a physiologist to know that the mother must have the best of care, both for her own sake and for the sake of her and his child. He was chained to a necessity. He would bear with her every fault, her irritability, her peevishness, her unreasonableness—everything. It would be time when this season was over to carry out his plan of living abroad or form another. He began by putting his arms around his wife affectionately. She yielded to his caress. While they were standing silent in each other's arms a servant rapped at the door and announced the man who had been called in for sympathy. The wife expressed annoyance.

"Tell him that I am not at home."

Then the husband made a discovery. Controlling himself, bearing with those faults which had shattered his ideal of married life, giving his wife occasional expressions of affection which meant nothing, but which were a part of his plan, he soon found that there were no objectionable traits to bear with, or, rather, that they had lost their virulence. His wife often appeared to him more unreasonable than ever, but the defect was atoned for by expressions of affection for him which, unlike his own, were sincere. The pain he had suffered from an uncongenial mate was changed for one of anxiety, softened by mutual affection, mutual interest in an expected pleasure. And now that this delightful sympathy was restored he began to dread lest he should lose her. This redoubled his attentions, his sympathy, his demonstrations of love, and these quadrupled the return.

One day, after hours of physical agony to the wife and mental agony to the husband, in a twinkling the sun shone through raindrops, smiles broke through tears. There were not only two lovers, but three. King Baby set up his throne in the household and ruled, an autocrat. It was what will your majesty please to wear? And what will your majesty please to eat? And when will your majesty please to sleep? And, most of all, when will your majesty permit others to sleep?

Then the husband made a second discovery. The first was that marital affection could only be gained by his sacrifice to the wife; the second was that the sacrifice of both to the child was imperative. This submission of the stronger to the weaker, a universal law of love, would not, even with these two primary lessons, have found a lodgment in the husband's brain had not the experience continued in a constant development. As his first submission had brought a return so did the second.

When the child began to know him, to stretch forth hands to him, to speak to him in fragments of words, to express love for him, then, and not till then, was he convinced that the first requisite of love is love.

RALPH EDWARD WALLACE