The marriage vows ought to include, in addition to the promise to share each other’s joys and pains, a promise to share each other’s ambitions.
To take just one example of ambition: if your husband is convinced that the nation needs his enlightened vision and that if he is not elected at least councilor of his borough life won’t be worth living, you should know what is in store for you. Even if public life, in your view, holds not the slightest attraction, you must wear a professional smile from morning till night and devote yourself relentlessly to every living creature of voting age, even if you like only babies and dogs. You must always be reassuring, neat but not too fashionable, more maternal than pin-up in style. On the other hand, the younger, handsomer and more telegenic your husband is, the better are his chances. So try not to be jealous of his success with women and console yourself with the thought that it is thanks to these charming ladies that he will be elected. And when he has finally won the office he coveted, you should also know that he will have to work so hard in order not to lose it that he will no longer have time for you, or rather, no more than the time it takes to pose for magazine and newspaper photographs. With all my heart, I hope that this life appeals to you as much as it does to him, because otherwise, if your ambition was to make jam in summer and to toast chestnuts in winter while serenely watching the years go by, it would have been better to have found a different husband.
But if it is you who are obsessed by the dazzling life of the Jet Set, if the only part of the newspaper that interests you is the society page, if your husband refuses to join the golf club which (you mistakenly believe) would be the first rung on the ladder leading to the paradise of a weekend at St Andrews, and persists in liking football, rugger and cricket, and if the nice little life he offers you is beginning to get you down, there are two solutions open to you: leave him and try to get a job as secretary to one of those fabulous persons whose activities fill the pages of the snob magazines, and I bet that within a year you will realize how empty is the existence of these slaves to pleasure, and you will miss the little shingled house where you could at least do as you pleased; or stay with him and patiently try to change his tastes by choosing more cultured friends, by reading something other than the society columns, and by becoming an authority on taste and etiquette among your own circle of friends. You must always be aware of your limitations, and if you absolutely insist on being a social leader, content yourself with being first-class in Southend-on-Sea rather than second-class in London.
But first of all, never marry a man whose ambitions you do not share or who doesn’t understand your own.
ANGEL
‘Mary, be an angel and get me my shirt!’
‘Mother, be an angel and sew on this button for me!’
If you have been an angel all day long, when evening comes you’ll find that you are dead on your feet but you haven’t yet grown wings.
