heir candor or discreet reticence.

Besides, how are we to know how far one generation is worse than
generations which have gone before it? Men are, after due time, forgiven
for this defiance of social usage, and women who were barely presentable
in youth become presentable enough by the time they reach middle age.
People may seem to us to be very equally and justly mated who
five-and-twenty years ago were the town's talk. It is practically
impossible, therefore, to compare the actual number of unequal marriages
in our day with those of a generation back. People may have their ideas,
but verification is not to be had. All we can do is to estimate the
increase in the conditions which are likely to make men find wives in a
rank below their own. If we look at these, there may be a good many
reasons for believing that the apprehensions of the shrewd and alarmed
observers are not without justification.

When a wise man with a living or a name to make, or both, looks for a
wife, he certainly does not desire a person who shall be troublesome and
an impediment to him. He wants a cheerful, sensible, and decently
thrifty person. He probably has no inclination for a bluestocking, nor
for a lady with aggressive views on points of theology, nor for one who
can beat him in political discussion. Strong intellectual power he can
most heartily dispense with. But then, on the other hand, he has no
fancy for sitting day after day at table with a vapid, flippant,
frivolous, empty soul who can neither talk nor listen, who takes no
interest in things herself, and cannot understand why other people
should take interest in them, who is penetrated with feeble little
egoisms. An aggressive woman with opinions about prevenient grace, or
the advantages of female emigration, or the functions of the deaconess,
would be far preferable to this. She would irritate, but she would not
fill the soul with everlasting despair, as the pretty vapid creature
does. To discuss predestination and election over dinner is not nice,
but still less is it nice to have to make talk with a fool, and to be
obliged to answer her according to her folly.

As the education of modern girls of fashion chiefly aims at making them
either very fast or very slow, it is not to be wondered at that men find
it hard to realize their ideals among their equals in position. It is
not merely that so many marriageable young ladies are ignorant. They are
this, but they are more. They are