admitting the absurdity
of connecting the ideas of his friend and marriage, is willing to pay
the necessary compliments, if he may do it as cheaply as possible.

In short, until a man is engaged to be married, he scarcely knows how
narrow a view his friends take of his character, and how easily they are
amused at what is after all rather a commonplace proceeding. When his
own friends look upon him so distinctly in the light of a joke, he of
course cannot expect much quarter from the friends of the lady. He has a
painful impression that he is coming out in a part for which he has had
no practice, under the eyes of hostile critics. Every man thinks it only
due to himself to criticise a friend's new purchases of horses or
pictures or wines; if he did not find fault with them he would miss an
opportunity of establishing his superior acumen. And of course the
principle extends to lovers. There is probably a narrow circle who are
bound officially to approve; but the unfortunate victim feels that,
outside of it, every acquaintance of the lady will take pleasure in a
keen observation of his defects, and he trembles accordingly. It is said
(rather unfairly, perhaps) that shyness is a form of conceit; but the
least self-conscious of mankind can hardly fail to feel uncomfortable
when he is called upon to perform such a highflown part under so severe
a scrutiny.

Of course the torment is far greater in the case of a middle-aged
professional gentleman, who is habitually employed upon some incongruous
work, than to a youth in whom any sort of folly is graceful; but there
can be few persons to whom the position is not to a certain extent
irksome. When a man is married, or when he is a bachelor, he is allowed
to be a rational being, taking rational views of life. He feels it
rather hard that in the interval society insists upon his being in a
state of temporary insanity, and then laughs at him because it doesn't
look natural. He begins to long even for that climax of misery when, if
the custom be not already dead, he will have to commit one of the most
absurd actions of which a human being can be guilty--namely, making a
speech in the morning, at an anomalous and dreary meal, exactly when his
shamefacedness is at its highest pitch. That so many people survive
engagements without any perceptible sourness of temper is some proof of
the goodness of human nature, or of the fact that there are
compensations in the state of being in love wh