A Wife With Character

PEOPLE say that husbands do not like too strong a personality in their wives. Doubtless there are some sufficiently imprudent to prefer a simpleton or a doll, provided she is exteriorly alluring, to a woman of real worth who may prove to be someone to cope with. To such men, the otherwise incorrect but witty sentence might truly be applied, “Women know well that men are not so stupid as people believe, they are more so!”

In the history of Byzantium, an interesting incident is related. Queen Theodora had just come into power. Her son, the prince who would succeed her should have a wife. According to custom messengers were sent out to bring to the palace the twelve most beautiful girls they could find.

After the first elimination, six remained from whom the future emperor. Theophilus was to choose his wife. Holding a golden apple in his hand the prince began his review. He was much attracted by a certain Kasia and just for something to say, he paid her this dubious compliment, “It is through woman that all evil has come to us.”

“Yes,” retorted Kasia, “but also all good.”

Frightened by such quick reply, indicative of a quick temperament, Theophilus carried his golden apple to someone else. A splendid example of masculine stupidity!

Happily the time when men reasoned that way is past. Those who are intelligent want to find in the woman they choose for their wife a person who is a real person.

Not one of those blue-stockings, justly contemned by the truly wise, for forgetting the reserve that is the precious attribute of their sex, posing as intellectuals, acting mannish, using language which lacks refinement and foolishly aping masculine ways.

When women are not women, they are worse than men and they are ridiculous besides.

Man does not desire to find a duplicate of what he is when he looks for a companion! It is Eve that Adam desires.

But he wants an Eve who is not just a woman expert in trinkets and in whom veneer takes the place of mental and moral virtues; he wants an Eve who is an honest-to-goodness woman, and if possible, one of unusual character; one who can see the world otherwise than through the narrow dimensions of the ring she wears on her finger and does not concentrate all her attention on her jams and jellies or her next new outfit; a woman who thinks before all else of her home, but precisely because she wants her home to be attractive and she herself to be attractive in that home, seeks to enlarge her horizons and to be truly a real person.