e chances of death may make the wife a widow, may
sweep out of existence all that she had made fundamental in her life,
may enrich her with insurance profits or hurl her into poverty, and
restore all the drifting expectancy of her adolescence....

Now, it is difficult to say why we should expect the growing girl, in
whom an unlimited ambition and egotism is as natural and proper a thing
as beauty and high spirits, to deny herself some dalliance with the more
opulent dreams that form the golden lining to these precarious
prospects? How can we expect her to prepare herself solely, putting all
wandering thoughts aside, for the servantless cookery, domestic
Kindergarten work, the care of hardy perennials, and low-pitched
conversation of the engineer's home? Supposing, after all, there is no
predestinate engineer! The stories the growing girl now prefers, and I
imagine will in the future still prefer, deal mainly with the rich and
free; the theatre she will prefer to visit will present the lives and
loves of opulent people with great precision and detailed correctness;
her favourite periodicals will reflect that life; her schoolmistress,
whatever her principles, must have an eye to her "chances." And even
after Fate or a gust of passion has whirled her into the arms of our
busy and capable fundamental man, all these things will still be in her
imagination and memory. Unless he is a person of extraordinary mental
prepotency, she will almost insensibly determine the character of the
home in a direction quite other than that of our first sketch. She will
set herself to realize, as far as her husband's means and credit permit,
the ideas of the particular section of the wealthy that have captured
her. If she is a fool, her ideas of life will presently come into
complete conflict with her husband's in a manner that, as the fumes of
the love potion leave his brain, may bring the real nature of the case
home to him. If he is of that resolute strain to whom the world must
finally come, he may rebel and wade through tears and crises to his
appointed work again. The cleverer she is, and the finer and more loyal
her character up to a certain point, the less likely this is to happen,
the more subtle and effective will be her hold upon her husband, and the
more probable his perversion from the austere pursuit of some
interesting employment, towards the adventures of modern money-getting
in pursuit of her ideals of a befitting life. And mea