in another mould
find not only annoyance but absolute misery. They know also that
marriage with a woman who is in the full tide of society means an
infinite augmentation of this round of tiresome and thoroughly useless
ceremonies. Add this consideration to the two other considerations of
elaborate vapidness and unfathomable extravagance, and you have three
tolerably good arguments why a man with large discourse of reason,
looking before and after, should be slow to fasten upon himself bonds
which threaten to prove so leaden.

The faults of the women of his own position, however, are a very poor
reason why he should marry a woman beneath his own position. A man must
be very weak to believe that, because fine ladies are often inane and
extravagant, therefore women who are not fine ladies must be wise,
clever, prudent, and everything else that belongs to the type of
companionable womanhood. The fact of the mistress being a blank does not
prove that the maid would be a prize. It may be wise to avoid the one,
but it is certainly folly to seek the other. Granting that the
housemaid or the cook or the daughter of the coachman is virtuous,
high-minded, refined, thoughtful, thrifty, and everything else that is
desirable under the sun, all will fail to counterbalance the drawbacks
that flow from the first inequality of position.

The misguided husband believes that he is going to live a plain
unsophisticated life, according to nature and common sense, in company
with one whom the hollowness and trickishness of society has never
infected. He is not long in finding out his irreparable blunder. The
lady is not received. People do not visit her, and although one of his
motives in choosing a sort of wife whom people do not visit was the
express desire of avoiding visits, yet he no sooner gets what he wished
than his success begins to make him miserable. What he expected to
please him as a relief mortifies him as a slight. Even if he be
unsympathetic enough in nature not to care much for the disapproval of
his fellows, he will rapidly find that his wife is a good deal less of a
philosopher in these points, and that, though he may relish his escape
from the miseries of society, she will vigorously resent her exclusion
from its supposed delights.

Again, from another point of view, he is tolerably sure to find that the
common opinion of society about unequal unions is not so unsound as he
used scornfully to suppose it to be. The vapi