At last the mar-riage bond has been blessed, and you have become a wife. However long the

honeymoon may last, your wedding day marks the opening of a new era — with new hopes, new duties, new tasks, and an effort such as you have never known before, for the new responsibility demands a new personality. However much your mother advised you at home, however many useful lessons and rules she recounted to fit you for this era, however much your beloved painted the future in glow-ing colors while you were engaged, and however much readiness and competence you showed at that time — none of this guarantees that the new life will not seem strange to you. The days of the engagement are poetry and dreams; but today, the second day after the wedding,

is the putting of those dreams into practice. And that comes about only through your will, through the measure of your readiness to accept the great new responsibilities, and through the measure of your fitness to carry out what your will and your readiness demand.

Therefore we advise you to face your new era as the queen of the house, not its slave. And this is an easy matter if you know well how to conduct yourself with your husband, for this conduct of yours is necessary to secure the happiness you seek. Here are some counsels:

1 — Keep your attentions away from your husband's desk except at his request. Even if your husband seems to work in disorder, the

likelihood is that he knows where his things are; so it is better not to earn his vexation by turning them over and changing their places while you claim to be making his affairs easier — he understands it as a mistake and a muddle.

2 — Learn his taste in food. If you are not good at cooking, roll up your sleeves at once and learn this great work, and you will see that cooking is the only art that is perfected in the course of its practice. But you will see something more astonishing and stranger still:

when you take an interest in his food, your husband understands that you are really taking an interest in him personally. So the preparing of everything according to the rules — with precision, elegance, and speed — he counts as a debt he is bound to repay.

3 — Beware of pressing him. If some anxiety or care shows on your husband, leave him be, for the cause may be a matter essential to his life and his position in society, or it may be the consideration of a change in

the manner of living, or of moving from one country to another.

4 — Be serious with your husband. If you see your husband despairing, do not suppose that joking will dispel despair. Just as you hope that he will consider your feelings in everything, take care not to leave his feelings out of account. If you enter into affairs he considers his own, proceed with deliberation and gravity, and refrain from disparag-ing what concerns him or absorbs his attention.

5 — You are not obliged to love all your husband's friends. Marriage does not oblige either spouse to be bound in affection to the other's companions; just as it is a mistake for a woman to