HOME MANNERS ARE BAD MANNERS
On the other hand, we have all seen the bonds of marriage vilely
abused by people who are never classed with shrews and wife-
beaters: they are indeed sometimes held up as models of
domesticity because they do not drink nor gamble nor neglect their
children nor tolerate dirt and untidiness, and because they are
not amiable enough to have what are called amiable weaknesses.
These terrors conceive marriage as a dispensation from all the
common civilities and delicacies which they have to observe
among strangers, or, as they put it, "before company." And here
the effects of indissoluble marriage-for-better-for-worse are very
plainly and disagreeably seen. If such people took their domestic
manners into general society, they would very soon find themselves
without a friend or even an acquaintance in the world. There are
women who, through total disuse, have lost the power of kindly
human speech and can only scold and complain: there are men who
grumble and nag from inveterate habit even when they are
comfortable. But their unfortunate spouses and children cannot
escape from them.
SPURIOUS "NATURAL" AFFECTION
What is more, they are protected from even such discomfort as the
dislike of his prisoners may cause to a gaoler by the hypnotism of
the convention that the natural relation between husband and wife
and parent and child is one of intense affection, and that to feel
any other sentiment towards a member of one's family is to be a
monster.
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