And there was so much that was good and fine and true in your character. The little heart of you was as big as the dawn itself over the wide hills. This was shown by your spontaneous impulse to rush in and kiss me goodnight. Nothing else matters tonight, son. I have come to your bedside in the darkness, and I have knelt there, ashamed!

It is a feeble atonement; I know you would not understand these things if I told them to you during your waking hours. But tomorrow I will be a real daddy! I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: "He is nothing but a boy-a little boy!"

I am afraid I have visualized you as a man. Yet as I see you now, son, crumpled and weary in your cot, I see that you are still a baby.

Yesterday you were in your mother's arms, your head on her shoulder. I have asked too much, too much.

"Most Men when seeking wives," says Paul Popenoe, Director of the Institute of Family Relations in Los Angeles, "are not looking for executives but for someone with allure and willingness to flatter their vanity and make them feel superior. Hence the woman office manager may be invited to luncheon, once. But she quite possibly dishes out warmed-over remnants of her college courses on 'main currents in contemporary philosophy,' and may even insist on paying her own bill. Result: she thereafter lunches alone.

"In contrast, the noncollegiate typist, when invited to luncheon, fixes an incandescent gaze on her escort and says yearningly, 'Now tell me some more about yourself.' Result: he tells the other fellows that 'she's no raving beauty, but I have never met a better talker.'"

Men should express their appreciation of a woman's effort to look well and dress becomingly. All men forget, if they have ever realized it, how profoundly women are interested in clothes. For example, if a man and woman meet another man and woman on the street, the woman seldom looks at the other man; she usually looks to see how well the other woman is dressed.

My grandmother died a few years ago at the age of ninety-eight.

Shortly before her death, we showed her a photograph of herself that had been taken a third of a century earlier. Her failing eyes couldn't see the picture very well, and the only question she asked was: "What dress did I have on?" Think of it! An old woman in her last December, bedridden, weary with age as she lay within the shadow of the century mark, her memory fading so fast that she was no longer able to recognize even her own daughters, still interested in knowing what dress she had worn a third of a century before! I was at her bedside when she asked that question. It left an impression on me that will never fade.

The men who are reading these lines can't remember what suits or shirts they wore five years ago, and they haven't the remotest desire to remember them. But women-they are different, and we American men ought to recognize it. French boys of the upper class are trained to express their admiration of a woman's frock and chapeau, not only once but many times during an evening. And fifty million Frenchmen can't be wrong!

I have among my clippings a story that I know never happened, but it illustrates a truth, so I'll repeat it:

According to this silly story, a farm woman, at the end of a heavy day's work, set before her men folks a heaping pile of hay. And when they indignantly demanded whether she'd gone crazy, she replied:

"Why, how did I know you'd notice? I've been cooking for you men for the last twenty years, and in all that time I ain't heard no word to let me know you wasn't just eating hay!"

The pampered aristocrats of Moscow and St Petersburg used to have better manners; in the Russia of the Czars, it was the custom of the upper classes, when they had enjoyed a fine dinner, to insist on having the cook brought into the dining room to receive their congratulations.

Why not have as much consideration for your wife? The next time the fried chicken is done to a tender turn, tell her so. Let her know that you appreciate the fact that you're not just eating hay. Or, as Texas Guinan used to say, "Give the little girl a great big hand."

And while you're about it, don't be afraid to let her know how important she is to your happiness. Disraeli was as great a statesman as England ever produced; yet, as we've seen, he wasn't ashamed to let the world know how much he "owed to the little woman."

Just the other day, while perusing a magazine, I came across this.

It's from an interview with Eddie Cantor.

"I owe more to my wife," says Eddie Cantor, "than to anyone else in the world. She was my best pal as a boy; she helped me to go straight. And after we married she saved every dollar, and invested it, and reinvested it. She built up a fortune for me. We have five lovely children. And she's made a wonderful home for me always. If I've gotten anywhere, give her the credit."

Out in Hollywood, where marriage is a risk that even Lloyd's of London wouldn't take a gamble on, one of the few outstandingly happy marriages is that of the Warner Baxters. Mrs Baxter, the former Winifred Bryson, gave up a brilliant stage career when she married. Yet her sacrifice has never been permitted to mar their happiness. "She missed the applause of stage success," Warner Baxter says, "but I have tried to see that she is entirely aware of my applause. If a woman is to find happiness at all in her husband, she is to find it in his appreciation, and devotion. If that appreciation and devotion is actual, there is the answer to his happiness also."

There you are. So, if you want to keep your home life happy, one of the most important rules is

• Rule 4: Give honest appreciation.

From Time immemorial, flowers have been considered the language of love. They don't cost much, especially in season, and often they're for sale on the street corners. Yet, considering the rarity with which the average husband takes home a bunch of daffodils, you might suppose them to be as expensive as orchids and as hard to come by as the edelweiss which flowers on the cloud-swept cliffs of the Alps.

Why wait until your wife goes to the hospital to give her a few flowers? Why not bring her a few roses tomorrow night? You like to experiment. Try it. See what happens.

George M. Cohan, busy as he was on Broadway, used to telephone his mother twice a day up to the time of her death. Do you suppose he had startling news for her each time? No, the meaning of little attentions is this: it shows the person you love that you are thinking of her, that you want to please her, and that her happiness and welfare are very dear, and very near, to your heart.

Women attach a lot of importance to birthdays and anniversaries- just why, will forever remain one of those feminine mysteries. The average man can blunder through life without memorizing many dates, but there are a few which are indispensable: 1492, 1776, the date of his wife's birthday, and the year and date of his own marriage. If need be, he can even get along without the first two- but not the last!

Judge Joseph Sabbath of Chicago, who has reviewed 40,000 marital disputes and reconciled 2,000 couples, says: "Trivialities are at the bottom of most marital unhappiness. Such a simple thing as a wife's waving good-bye to her husband when he goes to work in the morning would avert a good many divorces."

Robert Browning, whose life with Elizabeth Barrett Browning was perhaps the most idyllic on record, was never too busy to keep love alive with little, tributes and attentions. He treated his invalid wife with such consideration that she once wrote to her sisters: "And now I begin to wonder naturally whether I may not be some sort of real angel after all."

Too many men underestimate the value of these small, everyday attentions. As Gaynor Maddox said in an article in the Pictorial Review: "The American home really needs a few new vices.

Breakfast in bed, for instance, is one of those amiable dissipations a greater number of women should be indulged in. Breakfast in bed to a woman does much the same thing as a private club for a man."

That's what marriage is in the long run-a series of trivial incidents.

And woe to the couple who overlook that fact. Edna St. Vincent Millay summed it all up once in one of her concise little rhymes:

" 'Tis not love's going hurts my days, But that it went in little ways."

That's a good verse to memorize. Out in Reno, the courts grant divorces six days a week, at the rate of one every ten marriages.

How many of these marriages do you suppose were wrecked upon the reef of real tragedy? Mighty few, I'll warrant. If you could sit there day in, day out, listening to the testimony of those unhappy husbands and wives, you'd know love "went in little ways."

Take your pocket knife now and cut out this quotation. Paste it inside your hat or paste it on the mirror, where you will see it every morning when you shave:

"I shall pass this way but once; any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now.

Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again."

So, if you want to keep your home life happy,

• Rule 5 is: Pay little attentions. 

Walter Damrosch married the daughter of James G. Blaine, one of America's greatest orators and one-time candidate for President.

Ever since they met many years ago at Andrew Carnegie's home in Scotland, the Damroschs have led a conspicuously happy life.

The secret?

"Next to care in choosing a partner,". says Mrs Damrosch, "I should place courtesy after marriage. If young wives would only be as courteous to their husbands as to strangers! Any man will run from a shrewish tongue."

Rudeness is the cancer that devours love. Everyone knows this, yet it's notorious that we are more polite to strangers than we are to our own relatives. We wouldn't dream of interrupting strangers to say,

"Good heavens, are you going to tell that old story again!" We wouldn't dream of opening our friends' mail without permission, or prying into their personal secrets. And it's only the members of our own family, those who are nearest and dearest to us, that we dare insult for their trivial faults.