n spite of all prudent thought of meat and money
matters! Love in a cottage, and nightingales and honeysuckles to pay
the rent! And if parents object to their daughter marrying ruin, then
they are represented as monsters of cruelty; while the girl who flies
stealthily to her misery, and breaks every moral tie to do so, is
idealized into an angel of truth and suffering.

In real life what are parents to do with a daughter whose romantic
folly has made her marry their groom or their footman? We have
outlived the inexorable passions of our ancestors, and their undying
loves and hatreds, sacrifices and revenges. Our social code tolerates
no passion swallowing up all the rest; and we must be content with a
decent expression of feeling. What their daughter has done they cannot
undo; nor can they relieve her from the social consequences of her
act. She has chosen to put their servant above and before them, and to
humiliate her whole family, that she may please her low-born lover and
herself, and she has therefore no right to any more consideration than
she has given. Her parents may not cease to love her, and they may
spare her all reproaches, knowing that her punishment is certain; but
they cannot, for the sake of their other children, treat her socially
above the station she has chosen. She has become the wife of a
servant, and they cannot accept her husband as their equal nor can
they insult their friends by introducing him to them. How wretched is
the position she has put herself in; for if the man she married be
naturally a low man, he will probably drag her to his level by the
"grossness of his nature." If she be a woman of strong character she
may lift her husband upward, but she accepts such a labor at the peril
of her own higher life. And if she finds it impossible either to lift
him to her level or to sink herself to his level, what then remains?
Life-long regrets, bitter shame and self-reproach, or else a forcible
setting of herself free. But the latter remedy carries desperation
instead of hope with it. Never can she quite regain her maiden place,
and an _aura_ of a doubtful kind influences every effort of her future
life.

After all, though men have not the reputation of being romantic, it is
certain that in the matter of unequal marriage, they are more
frequently imprudent than women. There is some possibility of lifting
a low-born woman to the level of a cultivated man, and men dare this
possibility far more f