Marriage Quote by Thomas R. Dewar

A little Victorian deadpan does a lot of work here: Dewar pretends to offer marriage advice while quietly skewering the logic that props up “respectable” vice. The line turns on a surgical exception clause - “unless he is a steady winner” - that converts a moral indictment into a balance sheet. Gambling isn’t condemned because it corrodes trust, erodes intimacy, or makes a household volatile; it’s condemned because it loses money. If it paid reliably, the same behavior would suddenly become tolerable, even admirable. That’s the joke, and it’s also the accusation.

The intent is less to shame gamblers than to expose how conditional our ethics can be when comfort is at stake. Dewar gives “wife” the role of practical judge, not romantic partner, reflecting an era when marriage was openly economic in a way we now prefer to sentimentalize. The subtext stings: society will forgive recklessness if it arrives with dividends, and it will pathologize the exact same impulse when it produces debt. “Steady winner” is almost oxymoronic, too - the fantasy that gambling can be made stable, domesticated, responsibly lucrative. Dewar knows it can’t, which is why the punchline lands.

Contextually, the quip fits a late-19th/early-20th-century world where gambling was both a public scandal and a private habit, a marker of masculine bravado that women were expected to manage around. Dewar’s wit doesn’t rescue the wife; it reveals the trap: her endurance is priced, not honored.