ronounced to be "perfectly suited to
each other" are soon absolutely miserable. Marriage is the one thing
which everyone knows more about than people who are intimately
concerned.

[Sidenote: "Unequal Marriages"]

We hear a great deal of "unequal marriages," not merely in degree of
fortune, but in taste and mental equipment. A man steeped to his
finger-tips in the lore of the ancients chooses a pretty butterfly who
does not know the difference between a hieroglyph and a Greek verb, and
to whom Rome and Carthage are empty names. His friends predict misery,
and wonder at his blindness in passing by the young woman of equal
outward charm who delivered a scholarly thesis at her commencement and
has the degree of Master of Arts.

A talented woman marries a man without proportionate gifts and the
tabbies call a special session. It is decided at this conclave that "she
is throwing herself away and will regret it." To everyone's surprise,
she is occasionally very happy with the man she has chosen, though about
some things of no particular importance she knows much more than he.

The law of compensation is as certain in its action as that of
gravitation, though it is not so widely understood. Nature demands
balance and equality. She is constantly chiselling at the mountain to
lower it to the level of the plain, and welding heterogeneous elements
into homogeneous groups.

[Sidenote: The Certain Instinct]

The pretty butterfly may easily prove a balance wheel to the man of much
wisdom. She will add a vivid human interest to his abstract pursuits and
keep him from growing narrow-minded. He chose the element he needed to
make him symmetrical, with the certain instinct which impels isolated
atoms of hydrogen and oxygen to combine in the proportion of two to one.

It never occurs to the tabbies that no talent or facility can ever
stifle a woman's nature. The simple need of her heart is never taken
into account in the criticism of these marriages which are deemed
"unequal." If a woman holds an assistant professorship of mathematics in
a university, it is a foregone conclusion that she should fall in love
with someone who is proficient in trigonometry and holds his tangents
and cosines in high esteem. Happy evenings could then be spent with a
book of logarithms and sheets of paper specially cut to accommodate a
problem.

Similarity of tastes may sometimes prove an attraction, but very seldom
similarity of pursuit. Musicians do