You have no idea how simple and easy what I want to explain to you is." "Well, John, I can't to-night, anyhow, because I have a headache.

Just this talk has got my head to thumping so,--it's really dreadful! and I'm so low-spirited! I do wish you had a wife that would suit you better." And forthwith Mrs.Lillie dissolved in tears; and John stroked her head, and petted her, and called her a nice little pussy, and begged her pardon for being so rough with her, and, in short, acted like a fool generally.
"If that woman was _my_ wife now," I fancy I hear some youth with a promising moustache remark, "I'd make her behave!" Well, sir, supposing she was your wife, what are you going to do about it?
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.