ood, he tries so
steadfastly to please his wife--he is so often piteously
perplexed--this big, burly, blundering, blind-folded, _blessed_ John
of ours--that our knowledge of his disabilities enwraps him in a
mantle of affectionate charity. His efforts to master the delicate
intricacy of his darling's mental and spiritual organization may be
like the would-be careful hold of thumb and finger upon a butterfly's
wing, but the pain he causes is inconceivable by him. The suspicion of
hurt to the beautiful thing would break his heart. He could more
easily lie down and die for her than sympathize intelligently in her
vague, delicious dreams, the aspirations, half agony, half rapture,
which she cannot convey to his comprehension--yet which she feels that
he ought to share.

Ah! the pathos and the pity--sometimes the godlike patience of that
silent side of our dear John! Mrs. Whitney, writing of Richard
Hathaway, tells us enough of it to beget in us infinite tolerance.

"Everything takes hold away down where I can't reach or help," says
the poor fellow of his sensitive, poetical wife. "She is all the time
holding up her soul to me with a thorn in it."

"He did not know that that was poetry and pathos. It was a natural
illustration out of his homely, gentle, compassionate life. He knew
how to help dumb things in their hurts. His wife he could not help."

It reminds us of Ham Peggotty's tender adjustment upon his palm of the
purse committed to him by Emily for fallen Martha.

"'Such a toy as it is!' apostrophized Ham, thoughtfully, looking on
it. 'With, such a little money in it, Em'ly, my dear.'"

We are reminded more strongly of rough, gray boulders holding in their
hearts the warmth of the sunshine for the comfortable growth of mosses
that creep over and cling to and beautify them.

John is neither saint nor hero, except in Mary's fancy sketch of the
Coming Man. He remonstrates against canonization strenuously--dissent
that passes with the idealist for modesty, and enhances her
admiration. She is oftener to blame for the disillusion than he. With
the perverseness of feminine nature she construes strength into
coarseness of fibre, slowness into brutal indifference. Until women
get at the truth in this matter of self-deception, disappointment
surely awaits upon awakening from Love's young dream.

The surest guard against the shock of broken ideals is to keep ever
before the mind that men are not to be measured by feminin