THE CHRONICALLY DISCONTENTED WOMAN.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3206, 7 October 1881, Page 4

THE CHRONIC ALLY DISCONTENTED WOMAN.

The most depressing companion in the ■world is one who has given up all attempt to find wholesomo happiness in the condition in which she lives ; who is for ever looking for impossible perfections ; who will not be content with her roses because the stalks have fcherns. She makes everything minister to her discontent. If she lives by the seaside she hates the seaside, and can see beauty neither in the rolling billows with their passionate orests dashing against the rocks heaven-high, nor in the tranquil sleep of the summer ripple. She quotes those lines wMr,l, Waonhptnft the 'cruel, crawling, hungry foam, , till you are weary of the lirrution ; aud expressing herself as yearning for the leafy glades, and deep, dark, tranquil woods, the flowerful lanes and prosperous pastures of an agricultural country. Translated there she is suffocated—pines for breezy uplands, for the vigorous breath of the wide moorlands, the charms of the mountains. And when there she droops her lip and suggests fretfully the sunny south —Italy or Algeria—and talks of herself as a blighted kind of being because she was born in England and not in Naples, and has to be more familiar with snow and ice than with sunshine and sirocco. The same kind of thing goes into her husband's profession. Is he a man of business, doing his work honestly and laboriously in his office in the city ? She sighs as she confides to all her friends in turn her knowledge of the mistake that she made when she married a merchant rnther than an artist, a stockbroker instead of a clergyman. Ts he an artist , Wi l .'o is Sniggling gallantly against the thousand difficulties which beset n mnn wnoae breari cnrnc* from fbe luxury, the fuirp-in. lir ;; l ji /wt ni'idp o»t of Hie plpititit±\ i'V.'-!kiit. : t's .if ? .-J;e sny* pninh'ncr ; s ~ ■..'v;r--'-k- pri^j*^ l ' ol, ' a wretched !:!•:■•; n!' ■."•!!;'■! fi:^ , " ". n-iid shp wishes she hud MiHir'ieaVnj '"''mo in the world rothir than an ar.isl, who !ms tO »" hr »tt *? tn e o.npncrs of fashion, the irisoU. , " oo of picture dealers, and the insufferable patronage of picture buyers. Besides, she haC sitting as a model, and she will not allow ii\ ev nUB band to have any other. A doctor pirbl , ' ,er pangs of jealousy scarcely to be borne win."" 11 his patients are young, beautiful, and interesting. And then the night work, and the uncertainty. You never know when you are safe, she eavs, with an injured look. -I hat horrid night-bell; how she dreads the sound of it. And sometimes a summons comes in the middle of dinner. People are so inconsiderate, they never think of any one but themselves. And all those women who come with nothing whatever the matter with them, just to make love to her husband and turn bis head even more than it is turned already. And bo now with everything. The whole scale is constructed on the prinoiple of self-pity, discontent, and depreciation j nnd she thinks that she is worried by circumstances when she U only annoyed bj herself and her own peevish BatttrOo

To a chronioally discontented woman nothing whatever is as ifc should he. If she has a son, she wishes that he had heen a daughter ; if a daughter, she laments her hard fate in not having a son. As the children grow up, they grow exactly contrary to her desire. Those of the boys who develf p intellectual taste afflict her by their moral perversity and unmanly proclivities ; those who are athletes, and want to lead a vigorous physical life, afflict her just as muob hy their coarseness and want of soul. The daughter who likes hon»e and all domestio pleasures is a servantbbom" n °f place ; the daughter who has her duv° share of coquetry, and likes pleasures ana world, is a mere butterfly whom no man marry. Her pinched lips and sour fac" e grow thinner and more sour as she descants on their various disabilities, and finds her pleasure in her self-made maternal disappointments.—Tlve , Queen.