ou cannot demand the
slightest help or concern of her, so you ask it with diffident grace
and there is an overflowing stream of gratitude from small occasions.
Whatever you give her is a gift too, while a husband is just property,
a mere draught-camel for her service. All your functions are
decorative, you hang her shrine with flowers and precious stones. You
treat her to art and literature, and as for vulgar necessities--some
one else sees to that."

"Until you are married," began I.

"I am speaking of being engaged. Marriage is altogether a different
thing. The essence of a proper engagement is reverence, distance, and
mystery; the essence of marriage is familiarity. A _fiancee_ is a
living eidolon; a wife, from my point of view at least, should be a
confidential companion, a fellow-conspirator, an accessory after the
fact, at least, to one's little errors; should take some share of the
burthen and heat of the day with one, and have the humour to bear with
a mood of vexation or a fit of the blues. I doubt, do you know, if the
same kind of girl is suitable for engagements as for marriage. For an
engagement give me something very innocent, a little awe-inspiring on
that account, absolutely and tenderly worshipful, yet given to moods of
caressing affection, and altogether graceful and beautiful. A man, I
think, ought to be incapable of smoking or lounging in front of the
girl he professes to love, so reverent ought his love to be. But for
marriage let me have humour and some community of taste, a woman who
can climb stiles and stand tobacco smoke, and who knows a good cook by
her fruits.... It is a complicated business, this marrying.

"The familiarity of the marriage state, if it does not breed positive
contempt on the part of the angel, engenders at times, I think, a
considerable craving for change on the side of both parties. We men
are poor creatures at the best--I always pity your Euphemia. Married
people, for instance, always get too much of each other's conversation.
They do not have sufficient opportunity to recuperate their topics from
original sources. They get interested in outside people, merely from a
perfectly legitimate desire to get some amusing novel ideas for each
other, and then comes jealousy. I sometimes think that if Adam and Eve
had been merely engaged, she would not have talked with the serpent;
and the world had been saved an infinity of misery.

"No, George: engagements for me.