Flatland
relations, except in the lower strata of the Military Classes.
There the want of tact and discretion on the part of the husbands
produces at times indescribable disasters. Relying too
much on the offensive weapons of their acute angles instead
of the defensive organs of good sense and seasonable
simulations, these reckless creatures too often neglect the prescribed
construction of the women’s apartments, or irritate their wives
by ill-advised expressions out of doors, which they refuse
immediately to retract. Moreover a blunt and stolid regard for
literal truth indisposes them to make those lavish promises by
which the more judicious Circle can in a moment pacify his
consort. The result is massacre; not, however, without its
advantages, as it eliminates the more brutal and troublesome of
the Isosceles; and by many of our Circles the destructiveness
of the Thinner Sex is regarded as one among many providential
arrangements for suppressing redundant population,
and nipping Revolution in the bud.
Yet even in our best regulated and most approximately Circular families I cannot say that the ideal of family life is so high as with you in Spaceland. There is peace, in so far as the absence of slaughter may be called by that name, but there is necessarily little harmony of tastes or pursuits; and the cautious wisdom of the Circles has ensured safety at the cost of domestic comfort. In every Circular or Polygonal household it has been a habit from time immemorial—and now has become a kind of instinct among the women of our higher classes—that the mothers and daughters should constantly keep their eyes and mouths towards their husband and his male friends; and for a lady in a family of distinction to turn her back upon her husband would be regarded as a kind of portent, involving loss of status . But, as I shall soon shew, this custom, though it has the advantage of safety, is not without its disadvantages.
In the house of the Working Man or respectable Tradesman
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