"
I know that you were absorbed in Clarence for the first year of your
married life, and that you gave no least cause for any jealousy, and I
know, as you say, that even then he was often morbid and unhappy over
nothing at all.
He was jealous even of girl friends and relatives, and if you attended a
matinee with one of them, he sulked the whole evening.
This was little more than he did as a lover, and you should have begun
in those days to reason him out of such moods.
You imagined then it was his mad love for you which caused his
unreasonable jealousy.
But jealousy is self-love, and selfishness lies at the root of such
conditions of mind as his.
A woman should say to a man who sulks or goes into tantrums when she
pays courteous attentions to relatives or acquaintances, "You are
lowering my ideal of you--I cannot love a man who will indulge such
unworthy moods. You insult my womanhood and doubt my principles by your
suspicions; you intimate that I have neither truth, or judgment, or
pride. You must conquer yourself, and learn to trust me and to believe
in me, or I must decide I am no woman for you to take as a life
companion.
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