dity of a polite woman is
bad, but the vapidity of a woman who is not polite is decidedly worse. A
simpering unthinking woman with good manners is decidedly better than
an unthinking woman with imperfect manners; and if polish can spoil
nature among one set of people, certainly among another set nature may
be as much spoilt by lack of polish. It does not follow, from a person
being indifferently well-bred, that therefore she is profoundly wise and
thoughtful and poetic, and capable of estimating the things of this
world at their worth. Boys at college indulge in this too generous
fallacy. For grown-up men there is less excuse. They ought to know that
obscure uneducated women are all the more likely on that account to fall
short of magnanimity, self-control, self-containing composure, than
girls who have grown up with a background of bright and gracious
tradition, however little their education may have done to stimulate
them to make the foreground like it. To have a common past is the first
secret of happy association--a past common in ideas, sentiments, and
growth, if not common in external incidents.

One reason why a cultivated man is wretched with a vapid woman is that
she has not traveled over a yard of that ground of knowledge and feeling
which has in truth made his nature what it is. But a woman in his own
station is more likely to have shared a past of this sort than a woman
of lower station. Mere community of general circumstances and
surrounding does something. The obscure woman taken from inferior place
has not the common past of culture, nor of circumstance either. The
foolish man who has married away from his class trusts that somehow or
other nature will repair this. He assumes, in a real paroxysm of folly,
that obscurity is the fostering condition of a richness of character
which could not be got by culture. He pays the price of his blindness.
Untended nature is more likely to produce weeds than choice fruits, and
the chances in such cases as this are beyond calculation in favor of his
having got a weed--in other words, having wedded himself to a life of
wrangling, gloom, and swift deterioration of character. This result may
not be invariable, but it must be more usual than not.

In the exceptional cases where a man does not repent of an unequal match
of this sort, you will mostly find that the match was unequal only in
externals, and that his character had been a very fit counterpart for
that of a vulga