“Your lady correspondent ‘Madeline’ takes a very rosy view of the bicycle and its riders, which makes me believe she looks wholly from the outside. She may be a married lady ; but if so her husband doesn’t ride the bicycle, as mine does. It is a very pretty sight to see a row of riders glide by on their silent wheels, as ‘Madeline’ describes them, and if the experience ends when the bicycles pass out of sight there is nothing but pleasure in it; but when a woman has to live day after day with a bicycle rider, she soon learns what a nuisance the ‘wheel’ is.
“When my husband comes home from a ‘run,’ as he calls it, he…raises a terrible row if supper isn’t ready, and the way he eats would make a coal-heaver envious. Then he drags his dirty old wheel through the house, leaving his oily finger-marks on all the door-knobs, and shouts out to me that he has burst the buttons off his knee-breeches or torn a hole in his stockings, and I must drop everything and fix him up in decent order. Every few weeks he has to buy a new uniform, because ‘the club’ has voted to change it.
“Every one of these uniforms is more horrid in color and cut than the one before it, but he keeps on buying them, and I can’t get half the dresses that I am actually suffering for. As for the club meetings, I never could see what they were for, except to change the uniform, as I hear nothing else about them, though there must be a good deal of discussion about it, for they are held almost every other night.
“Before my husband bought his bicycle, we used to make pleasure trips on Sundays to the cemetery, to see the grave of his mother-in-law; but now on summer Sundays there is always a ‘meet’ somewhere, and I don’t see him from morning till night. I suppose he improves (?) the time by riding up and down in front of the windows of ‘Madeline,’ and other women who like such things; but if any fellow comes riding by my house, I always feel like setting the dog at him.
“I see that some other ladies agree with ‘Madeline,’ and perhaps ‘most all do ; but I hope you will not refuse to print this in your paper, to show there is One who Doesn’t.”
