Tag Archives: marriage

The Next Secretary of Agriculture Has Got to Be a Diplomat

Ring Lardner

The Morning Union/January 16, 1921

It begins to look like all the letters I write you is opened by mistake or somebody and at lease I don’t get no answer to them but as far as the last letter I wrote is conserned it don’t make no differents if you got it or no, as I have changed my mind since writeing it. I said in that letter about wishing you would give me the post master gen. portfolio in your cabt. but I don’t want that birth now, Hon., because in the 1st. place one of my actor friends has pointed out that I was all wrong in thinking it would be a soft spot to make a hit in just like following a bum act on a vaudeville bill.

He says on the contrary that it would be one of the toughest jobs I could pick out as it is next to impossible to get the tension of a audience after they been laughing themselfs sick at a comical sketch. And in the 2d. place things has came up lately that makes it look like they was a more important job than post master gen. or secy. state or any of them, namely secy. of agriculture. 

Up to now about all a secy. of agriculture had to do was run the weather burro and find out the different zones where democrats would grow and speaking about democrats we use to hear them spoke of as died in the wool, but it looks now like some of them had found cotton just as fatal, but what I am getting at is that the last few wks. has broughten up a question that bids fair to revolutionize country life in America and If you go and appoint some dumb bell as secy. of agriculture, in a crisis like this here, why 4 yrs. from now they won’t be enough rubes left in the republican party to hold the convention. 

The question I refer to is how many wifes or husbands a farmer and his wife should ought to have and vice versa. It seems like the question started by a farmer out west somewheres saying that every farmer should ought to have 2 wifes because they was so much work for one that they generally always died off by the time they was 35 and left the farmer a widower with his garden full of widower weeds. But if they was 2 of them, why they would both live to 70 and enjoy the drugery of a farmer’s wife twice as long.

Two Sides to Every Question.

Well then a farmer’s wife come back and said the problem could be solved by the wife haveing 2 husbands, one to raise the crops and the other to stick around the house and crank the Ford and cows which is the drugery that kills the wife the way things is now. 

A good many jokes is made at farmers expense by funny writers and actors and etc, but when you come to cases, as they say, why this country could probably spare all the funny writers and actors easier than they could spare all the farms and in fact how could we live without ye hick. So America’s biggest problem today, outside the question of bobbing their hair, is how to keep the saps and their wifes satisfied and that is the problem that needs a master mind to set in as secy. of agriculture, and that is why I withdraw my application for post master gen, and offer myself and brains to what has now became the most vital place in your cabt—namely the aggie portfolio. 

You will want to know have I give any time to the study of this situation. The best way I can answer that question is write down some of my idears on same and leave you judge for yourself.

Well, to begin with, if a farmer needs 2 wifes, give him 2 wifes and I know several city husbands that is willing to contribute to the good cause. And if a farmer’s wife needs 2 husbands give her 2 husbands. But in both cases it has got to be done with reservations.

For inst. you couldn’t give every farmer’s wife 2 husbands and every farmer 2 wifes because that would mean 2 doubly marred couple liveing together on every farm, and the whole mixed foursome would die of murder long before they was 35 yrs. old. They would half to be 2 wifes and one husband on one farm and 2 husbands and one wife on another farm, and so on till you come to the city limits. 

Second Husband in Bad.

They would half to be a set of strick rules governing the dutys of the respective husbands on the farm where males was most populous and another set for the wifes on farms where they was a surplus of the fair sex. For inst. on. a 2-husband farm, the husband that done all the hard work in the fields would be the captain and first husband, and the one that stayed home and done the chores would be the second husband.

I suppose you think that all the men folks would want to be somebody’s second husband, but the job ain’t as easy as it sounds like. For inst. one of his chores would include seeing her most all day and it’s a custom amongst some farmer’s wifes to go around in their bear ft, and a mother Hubbard and not comb their hair till the cows comes home. And dureing the day time the second husband wouldn’t be allowed to even step outside of the vicinity of the house, barn and etc. which could be known as “Chore Acres.” He couldn’t go out in the evenings neither without the first husband’s permission and the latter would have first choice at escorting the Mrs. in town to the movies when she said let’s go.

So all and all the first husband would be the best job and I would award it to the man that past the best examination which I would hold myself personly in Washington every so often and ask them a few questions on intensive farming like how many ears is they in a acre of corn and etc. But which ever one would have the best job the system would make farming more attractive to men than it is now, because now under the one-husband system, the farmer has got to shave every Saturday where with 2 of them it would be every other Saturday off. 

On a 2-wife farm you couldn’t work the first and second wife plan or have one of them captain of the team because wile all men is born pretty near equal, all women is born a whole lot better than each other and the only order one woman will take from another is go lay down a wile and let me wash the dishes. 

The way a 2-wife farm would have to be ran would be to run it in shift’s, a day on and a day off, or a week on and, a week off. Probably it would be better to make it week and week so as the wife that wasn’t working would have a little time to get use to shoes. But any shift would do just so the work was split even and the both of them could live to be 70, and by that time it would be mighty sweet household to live in.

On a wife’s week off our mutual husband would have to take her to town as many evenings as she wanted to go and chances is that he wouldn’t live to be more than 22 himself but I would always try and have such nice wifes on a 2-wife farm that they would be a long waiting list of replacements for the husbands that felt in battle.

Of course they would half to be a rule preventing communication of any kind between 2 farms of opp sex because if a farm with 2 wifes and 1 husband was on friendly terms with a farm that had 2 husbands and 1 wife, they might be results that would upset the whole scheme. Social relations would only be allowed between farms of the same gender.

That is how I got the problem worked out in my mind. Hon., but it will take a man like I to step in and run things and see that everybody is satisfied with the spouses I provide for them, and I could go into more details about the plan only how, do I know it you read my letters or not, so I will close with just a word in regards to saveing the govt. money if you give me this job.

One of my first acts would be can all the high price experts in the weather burro because I can just as good as they can and I can go them one better and make whatever kind of weather the farmers wants. For inst. if they’s a dry spell and the crops is burning up, why all as I halt to do is jump in the car and start for town and before I get ½ way there its raining pitchforks, which I would also send around to the farmers partial post along with the sorrel seeds.

And just another word Hon., when man is elected President or to a high Office they generally always begin talking about doing away with party lines and etc. Well if you make me secy. of agriculture I will do away with the party lines between farms and give the farmers’ wifes more time to druge. They’s enough time wasted in citys answering your own phone, but when you half to and listen every time one of your neighbors gets called up no wonder you die at 35.

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Wed Despite Opposition! Well, Of Course They Did

Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/February 4, 1909

AND so they were married.

“Despite the opposition of parents,” the headlines tell us.

I hope it was “despite” the opposition and not because of it—that marriage.

If I wanted my daughter to marry a commonplace grocer with a big hank account, I would begin to “oppose” him with all the opposition I could muster.

I’d tell her he looked cold and cruel.

I’d say that he had secretive eyes and a deceitful nose. I’d swear I’d seen him somewhere In another country under another name. I’d hint that he was a Bluebeard. And that nobody could possibly find out how many times he’d been married. And some fine morning I’d wake up the proud mamma-in-law of a prosperous person who would let me run a bill for coffee and sugar for quite a while.

“In spite of opposition”—how many, many marriages have been made that would never have been even dreamed of if some one had not gone to work to try to prevent them!

AND the bride in this case, it appears, has $30 and the groom has but seven.

Well, what of it?

How many dollars did you have, Mr. Doting Parent, when you and the woman who’s worn your ring for so many years slipped down to the preacher’s and were married back there in the plain farming country?

You weren’t rolling in riches before you dared to fall in love, were you? And your sweetheart didn’t know and didn’t care whether you had $5 left, when you had paid the minister or not.

Your girl is no better than her mother and no worse, either.

She has just the same courage, and the same loving heart, and the same good sense that her mother had before her—and who are you to teach her to be mercenary and grasping, and self-seeking?.

EVERY once in a while, some one rises in public gathering and denounces the young people of today.

“The young men are selfish and the young women are mercenary,” declare the denouncers.

Fudge!

The young men and the young women are all right.

It’s the old men and the old women who are all wrong.

“My dear,” said a woman to me the other day, “you know how Genevieve was brought up petted, spoiled, indulged. Well, this man she’s married took her to Philadelphia on a business trip with him, and some one called on them and do you know that they had a back room at the hotel, and had worn the same dress to dinner three days in succession?”

And not all the arguments in the world would have convinced that poor old woman that Genevieve was so happy that she didn’t know whether she lived in a front room or a back one, and that she was too busy having fun to worry about her clothes.

MONEY—that’s about all you have when you’ve passed forty—money, and the poor substitutes for happiness that money buys—fine clothes, rich fare, soft living.

Let the poor old forties have the money, girls and boys; you take the real things of life, and take them gayly, with light hearts, as your mothers and fathers did before you.

There’s time enough for you to earn for the fol de rols and fil dols when you are so faded that can’t look neat in a myrtle gown and so jaded that a plain mutton chop and a stick of celery isn’t a good enough dinner for a king.

Walt till your own daughter is growing up before you let the little yellow money demon get you in his clutches. You’ll be past any particular harming by him by that time.

As for you, you newly married young people, a long life to you and not a day of regret in it.

You’ve set all the grumbling old fogeys a good example—an example of youth and courage and sincerity—and in my opinion the world is the better off for all such natural, simple, real people as you seem to be.

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Upton Sinclair Calls Marriage Slavery and Ceremony a Farce

Annie Laurie

Oakland Tribune/January 30, 1909

Upton Sinclair says he’s sorry he’s married.

He said it right out loud in a calm, matter-of-fact tone of voice.

I read about the Robins people—the couple who don’t believe in marriage and who have decided to take the world Into their confidence and proclaim that they have never been married at all, and that they never intend to marry at all—not nobody, nowhere, at no time—all because they believe that modern marriage is a hideous mockery, and a horrible sin. So I went down to Mr. Sinclair’s hotel to see what he thought about the Robins and their views of the marriage question.

Hears Amazing Thing

Mr. Slnclair was pleasant enough to invite me to a most delightful vegetarian luncheon and then I sat there and listened, with eyebrows that I did my best to keep vertical, to all kinds of amazing things—mostly about marriage.

“These Rabins must be people of great courage and fine character,” said Mr. Sinclair. “It takes grit to be a pioneer. Of course, they are doing the right thing. I have never believed in marriage. Who could, and know any married people at all? But I wasn’t brave enough to live up to my convictions.

“When my wife and I fell in love with each other, we talked the whole marriage business over very conscientiously. We both of us hated the idea of being tied together by either a religious or a legal ceremony, and we tried to make up our minds to set the right kind of example to the world.

“But we know that Mrs. Sinclair’s father and mother would go raving crazy if we did what our conscience told us was right. So to ease their minds we let some one mumble a few words over us—and made them  happy.

Calls Ceremony “Farce”

“l wish now we had done as these Robins people have had the courage and the fortitude to do—lived together without the farce of a foolish and obsolete ceremony.

“The world would have been that much farther ahead on the road to progress.

“We were young and foolish then, and now we have seen the world and know a great many married people—so we are a good deal ashamed of being married ourselves.

“Why am I so prejudiced against marriage?

“Why shouldn’t I be prejudiced against it? You might as well ask me why I am so prejudiced against slavery—or against thievery—or if it comes to that, against murder either.

“Marriage in this day is nothing but legalized slavery; that’s the most polite word to call it, I fancy.

“The average married woman is bought just exactly as much as any horse or any dog is bought.

“She is absolutely dependent upon her husband for her food and clothes, and she marries him just to get the very best food and clothes that she can command in the market.

“What are all these balls and parties—but bargain sales?

“This lovely blonde for half a million, a little shop worn, going at half price.

This gorgeous brunette on the bargain counter today, $20,000 a year will buy her. That’s what it all means—this display and parade and music and feasting and flowers. Every woman with a daughter is a match-maker, and she is looking for bargains, too.

“Talk about a fire sale rush—you just watch a young man with a good income or good prospects of a good income at a party, and you’ll see what the word ‘rush’ means.

“Women will never marry for love and for love alone until they become economically independent.

Independent Women

“A woman wage-earner will not marry for a home, when it gets to be as swell to earn your own living as it is to have some man earn it for you.

“Marriage of today is worse than a farce; it is a hideous tragedy.

“How many happy married people do you know?”

“About one couple in ten thousand.

“There’s So and So, a dissipated, selfish wreck—his wife lives with him rather than to go out and earn her own living.

“I don’t like to have my wife associate with women who do such things. I consider it immoral to encourage such horrible immorality.

“There is Thus and So, a morbid egotist, absorbing his wife’s very vitality and fairly eating up her very soul.

“There is Johnson buying bis wife pretty clothes, dressing her like a doll and making love to every woman he meets.

“She knows it, and she knows that he knows that she knows he knows it—but what’s the difference. A pair of pendant earrings at the right time or a new chinchilla coat—and it’s all right.

“Marriage! Faugh!”

“Marriage—ough! It really isn’t a subject to be discussed at the table.”

“But if all these people you speak of were not married to each other, Mr. Sinclair, only just living together, without a ceremony, do you think they would be happier then?” I ventured.

“They wouldn’t live together,” said Mr. Sinclair. “When they got tired of each other they’d quit.”

“And find some one else?” I queried, timidly.

“Perhaps,” answered Mr. Sinclair, calmly.

“And then?” I breathed in diffident but determined tones.

“And then,” said Mr. Sinclair, firmly, “what then? Nothing matters so long as the human race progresses. It may come through pain and through sorrow and through humiliation and through martyrdom, the progression, but come it must, and before we can climb very high on the stairs of progress we have got to leave the old-fashioned marriage contract at the foot of the steps.”

I found my dazed and somewhat bewildered way down the hill to Market street and down Market street to the little vegetarian restaurant kept and run by the Robins, Mr.—may I call her for this once again?—Mrs. Robins.

Eyes That Dream

Mr. Robins is a pale little man with a high, broad forehead, and a pair of dark eyes that dream, and Mrs. Robins is rather an attractive woman of the Swiss type, with large blue eyes, black lashed, plenty of black hair, a sweet smile and a great deal of fresh and perfectly natural color.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Robins, showing me to a seat at a plain little table at the end of the plain little restaurant, “I am the woman you read about in the papers. We didn’t want it to get into the papers, but since it was in why, we’ll have to make the best of it.

“No, I never married Mr. Robins. Yes, I have been called his wife for five years. I do not believe In marriage.

“It is a cruel and wicked slavery. want to be free; I could not bear to tie myself by any ceremony to any man.”

To Remain Happy

Mr. Robins smiled gently across a somewhat crumpled tablecloth and said very softly, “We are not separating because we are unhappy.

“We are separating because we are happy—and we want to keep happy.”

“Yes,” nodded Mrs. Robins, her large blue eyes afire with what looked like intelligent Interest. “That’s the way to keep happy—to separate.

“We have never quarreled, and we intend to part so that we never will have quarrels.

“Too much companionship is the worst kind of slavery. I want to live my life my own way, and I want this man I have loved for five years and love now to live his life, his own way; that’s all there is to it. There is no mystery—nothing but plain common sense. I despise the average married woman. I look upon her as a poor drudge, bought and paid for by her clothes and board.

Would “Improve World”

“When there are no more such women as she in the world the world will come nearer to being fit for honest, self-respecting women to live in.

“No true woman can be a helpless parasite and keep even a pretense of self-respect. Some day the world will see this, and then there will be no more marriage and no more misery, stunted, half-developed lives.”

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Some Advice to Women

Annie Laurie

The Western Sentinel/April 23, 1909

A well known and extremely clever woman made a speech at the Women’s Wage Earner’s Convention the other day, and in that speech she said not once but many times that the one thing important for working women to do was to range themselves together to fight the tyrant man.

What on earth are women who say things like that thinking about?

Women wage earners are paid salaries to do their work—not to be women.

The man who wants a competent stenographer doesn’t care whether that stenographer is black, white, green or yellow; old or young, man or woman. Half the time he really doesn’t know. All he knows is that his work is well done, in which case the stenographer gets a good salary and holds on to a good position.

Or that the work is ill done; in which case the stenographer gets a poor salary and will lose the position the very first time there’s chance to employ someone more competent.

The factory girl who gets fired for being late to work is fired not because she’s a girl, but because she’s late.

There is and should be no such thing as sex in business.
A business woman who wants to succeed never says anything about her headache or her backache or her home troubles to the man who pays her salary. She isn’t a woman to him, she’s an employee, and if she has any self-respect at all, that’s what she wants to be.

The fact is, men in business are not tyrannical enough to women in business.

The average man is so much kinder to his woman stenographer than he is to his male clerks that the idea of calling him a tyrant in his dealings with women is a joke.

Business men put up with enough silly incompetence from women to make them out a title clear to the name of martyr, and not to the name of tyrant.

It’s all wrong, the whole woman in business proposition; all wrong.

Women ought not to have to be in business at all. But as long as they do have to be in business then they must attend to business and expect to be treated like paid employees, and not like personal friends.

If women would “range themselves together” to do the work they are paid to do, and let it go at that, there would “conventions” and in their listening to speeches about the “tyrant man” who pays them the money that buys their bread and butter.

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The Awful Cruelty of the Mud Pack

Damon Runyon

St. Joseph Gazette/February 9, 1937

We note that a Long Island lady got legal separation from her husband the other day on the grounds of mental cruelty. She said her husband stays out all night playing cards. 

We are willing to concede that this practice may be developed to a degree where it constitutes mental cruelty to a wife, all right, but our own experience teaches us that it is apt to be just as cruel mentally to the husband. 

We mean the staying out all night playing cards. We know of nothing crueler, mentally, than the cold, gray morning light coming up on an all-night card game in which a husband is a bad loser, with the additionally cruel prospect before him of confronting the good wife later on.

However, that isn’t the point of our lecture. We often run into items of news about legal separations and divorces on the grounds of mental cruelty, and we are struck by the fact that on this particular ground, the wife is generally the plaintiff. 

We don’t know why husbands do not avail themselves more of this plea. It may be that they have not yet been properly advised as to some of the things that constitute mental cruelty. For instance, mud packs, when used in the home. 

Our legal department assures us that the mud pack, when used in the home, is without a doubt mental cruelty to a brutal and inhuman degree, and would be so held by any fair and impartial court of married men.

The mud pack is a species of facial treatment that has become rather popular among the ladies in recent years. It consists of the application to the features of a thick layer of a gooey substance that they call mud. 

It probably isn’t actually mud, at least not the kind of mud that sends a fellow to a form chart to see if there is anything to indicate that a steed ought to run in that kind of going. But it looks like mud, and it feels like mud, and just between all of us over here in the corner, it tastes like mud. 

It is an oily, olive-green substance in the beginning, not greatly dissimilar to the mud we used to have in the alley on rainy days back of the soap factory in Peppersauce Bottoms. But when applied to the features, and permitted to dry, it turns grayish color, lending a slightly ghastly aspect to the wearer, especially as she usually pins her hair well back so the mud will not get mixed up with it. 

At first, the ladies underwent this facial treatment somewhat surreptitiously in the cloisters of the beauty parlors, and the gentlemen knew of it only by vague rumor. 

As a completely secret practice, the mud pack could scarcely be deemed a cause for action, of course. But then the ladies got to mudding it up at home. The first disclosures of this fact being made public when a gentleman on Morningside Heights went home unexpectedly one afternoon, and, finding his good wife with her features packed in mud, took a shot at her, thinking she was a ghost. 

The gentleman might have been acquitted if he hadn’t taken two more shots after she had confessed her identity, although fortunately none of the shots took effect. The gentleman got two years, and some hinted afterwards that the jury of married men were themselves aware of the mud pack and were sore at him because he missed. 

Anyway, the ladies no longer exercise any restraint or secrecy with reference to the mud pack, and it is said to be a medical fact that cardiac cases among married men have materially increased as the result of the shock that invariably ensues when a gentleman sees his good wife in a mud pack for the first time, or even the second or third time. 

This shock reacts on the mind and becomes mental cruelty.

The mental cruelty is all the greater, our legal department advises, because the avowed purpose of the mud pack is to beautify the face, yet after the mud pack is peeled off the face revealed is invariably the same old face. 

Our legal department says that the mud pack takes its place as mental cruelty, along with the fiendish practice of wives compelling husbands who have reached the stage where they are wearing cantaloupes under their vests to attend movies in which Mr. Clark Gable is depicted taking a bath. 

If not Mr. Clark Gable, then Mr. Tyrone Power, or Mr. Robert Taylor, or Mr. Franchot Tone. It is very strange, our legal department ruminated, that the movies never depict Mr. Guy Kibbee taking a bath.

Our legal department thinks the frowner is also mental cruelty, but it isn’t sure. They said they would look it up and let us know. 

The frowner is a device that the ladies paste between their eyes to prevent frowns from turning into permanent wrinkles. Our legal department said it sounds like plenty of mental cruelty to them.

We then asked what the legal department thought of the practice of mature married ladies leaving off their stockings when they put on evening dress, tinting their toenails a bright vermilion, and forcing their husbands to escort them, in this array, before the public gaze. 

We wanted to know if that isn’t mental cruelty to the husband. Our legal department hasn’t given us a formal answer as yet, but we hear it has six of its best lawyers hurriedly preparing an advance defense to charges of disturbing the peace, just in case.

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Marriage Avoider Basks in the Miami Sun

Damon Runyon

Patriot News/December 18, 1937

Miami Beach, Florida, Dec. 17.- George Ade says if he had it all to do over again, he probably would get married.

This statement may be taken as in the nature of an important confession from the man who for many years ranked as perhaps the most eligible bachelor in the United States.

He was young, rich, healthy, handsome and famous in the days when his name generally led the list of the male matrimonial desirables of the land.

He was tall, slender, romantic looking. He was a celebrated writer of stories and plays. He was a nifty dresser. He had a fine background. He was the type that attracted attention. The ladies said “00-00” when he went by. He was everything you would think a gal would want in marriage.

Skillful or Lucky?

But Mr. Ade never married. It is conceivable that many a snare and pitfall of matrimonial intent was planted along his path of single blessedness as he journeyed through his twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and even sixties, yet he side-stepped them with amazing skill.

Other gentlemen who were unable to avoid the traps used to eye Mr. Ade’s unhampered ease, and freedom from double responsibilities, with great envy. Some said he was just plain lucky. Mr. Ade himself is not so sure about that as he pointed for the seventy-second year mark, which he will reach next February.

“It’s all right being a bachelor when you are a young bachelor,” he said to other day, “but it’s a tough life when you get to be an old bachelor and find yourself pretty much alone. You have to marry a club then for company. Yes, I guess if I had it all to do over again, and know what I know now, and could find somebody who would have me, I’d probably get married.”

We looked Mr. Ade up in his winter home on Miami Beach. He has lived for the past six winters in a modest little rented house that reflects none of the magnificence of his permanent home, which is a beautiful farm at Brook, Indiana. The number of the house is 1313, showing that Mr. Ade is not superstitious about thirteen, anyway.

Movies and Prize Fights

He lives there alone. He has a housekeeper and a chauffeur. He keeps up his writing, goes to all the movies, big, little, good, bad, or indifferent, and to the race track when the horses are running. He attends the local prize fights, and visits with rich neighbors on the beach from Chicago, like Mr. Johnny Hertz.

In general, Mr. Ade leads a fairly active life. His still luxuriant hair is snowy white. His once towering frame is but slightly stooped. He remains a fine figure of a man, and looks better now, physically, than at any time in the past several years.

Mr. Ade first rose to fame as one of the greatest humorists this country has ever produced when he was writing a daily column for a Chicago newspaper years ago. The column was called “Stories of the Streets and of the Town,” and it saw the birth of “Artie,” “Doc Horne,” “Pinky Marsh,” and “Fables in Slang.”

From Fables to Plays

The last were so enormously popular that Mr. Ade quit daily columning after seven years and did one “Fable” a week for a New York syndicate. That left him with a lot of time on his hands and he turned to writing plays. He wrote “The Sultan of Sulu,” “The College Widow,” “The County Chairman,” “The Fair Co-Ed,” and others, and made a raft of money.

That was when the newspapers used to talk about his matrimonial eligibility, and hook his name up with that of almost every gal he as much as looked at, including various theatrical stars, though these latter hook-ups were mainly the product of the genius of the press agents for the plays Mr. Ade wrote, and the author was just a defenseless bystander.

“But why did you never marry?” we asked.

“Well,” Mr. Ade said, with more levity than a serious subject like matrimony warrants, “in a time when I might have contemplated matrimony, a marriage license cost $2, and I never had the money. By the time I got the $2, I had lost the idea of marriage.

“Kindly be serious,” we said.

“All right,” he said. “I suppose I lived in hall bedrooms too long, and got too thoroughly undomesticated. On top of that, maybe no woman would have had me.”

We did not ask if he ever tried to find out. That would have been a little personal. Of course even now Mr. Ade cannot be considered utterly beyond matrimonial salvage, but we rather inferred that the prospect is somewhat remote, at least at the moment.

However, you never can tell what the Dade county climate will do to, or perhaps we should say for, a man.

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