What a wife learned who tried to improve her husband

Take the expression “cold-blooded” for instance—little shining pieces of ice circulating in the arteries, passing the heart every half hour and giving it a chill, flying through the brain like an express train through a prairie village and making warm decisions into cool ones. An unpleasant thought!

But there was nothing cold-blooded about young Coatesworth. He liked people—and that's much rarer than it sounds. Some are impelled to seek company by an inexhaustible curiosity, some are driven to it by sheer boredom with themselves and others congregate for no more reason than that the pithecanthropus erectus huddled in groups a hundred thousand years ago. But young Coatesworth liked people. He had an almost blind eye for their imperfections, he knew how to keep his mouth shut and his blood was warm. He is what is often known among men as a “hell of a nice fellow.” This was no casual compliment. As niceness goes in this somewhat unpleasant world, he was.

So in college he had been enormously popular—vice-president of his class and manager of some athletic team. Afterwards, in the army, his company were wildly sentimental about him, and when the war was over had a way of writing him from Kokomo, Indiana or Muscatine, Iowa, about their successes and their failures and the births of their male children. Coatesworth always answered their letters even when he was very busy—because he himself was somewhat sentimental. Besides, he was nice.

When he was twenty-seven he fell in love with Jaqueline James, who likewise lived in Indianapolis, and married her. She married him, of course, because he was such a nice fellow. Why he married her is a little harder to guess, because of all the young girls in the city she seemed the most completely selfish and the most exquisitely spoiled. People went around talking about the attraction of opposites for each other—and meant nothing complimentary to Jaqueline James.

After the Coatesworths had been married a year they came to themselves and began to look each other over with discerning eyes. There was a great deal of affection between them and neither found anything particularly alarming in the other, for a selfish person and an unselfish person usually get on together very well indeed.