merits, during the pauses of the Trois Temps, or while nailing "a rover"
at croquet, or, mayhap, when promenading at the Botanical?

I doubt it much.

Professor Owen, it is said, will, if you submit to his notice a couple
of inches of the bone of any bird, beast, fish, or reptile, at once
describe to you the characteristics of the animal to which it belonged;
its habits, and everything connected with it; besides telling you when
and where it lived and died, and whether it existed at the pre-Adamite
period or not--and that, too, without your giving him the least previous
information touching the osseous substance about which you asked his
opinion.

But, granting that the most gigantic theory might be built up on some
slighter practical evidence, I would defy anyone--even that
philosophising German who evolved a camel from the depths of his inner
moral consciousness--to determine the capabilities of any young lady for
the future onerous duties of wife and mother, and mistress of a
household, merely from hearing her say what coloured ice she would have
after the heated dance; or, from her statements that the evening was
"flat" or "nice," the season "dull" or "busy," and the heroine of the
last new novel "delightful," while the villain was correspondingly
"odious."

He couldn't do it.

The commonplace conversation of every-day society is no criterion for
character.

With Jemima, the maid-of-all-work, and Bob, the baker's assistant, her
"young man," it is quite a different thing. They have no trammels
placed in the way of their free association; and, I would venture to
assert, know more of one another in one month of company-keeping than
Augustus and Laura will achieve in the course of any number of seasons
of fashionable intercourse. A "Sunday out" beats a croquet party
hollow, in its opportunities for intimacy--as may readily be believed.

It is, really, curious this ignorance common in middle-class husbands
and wives, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, respecting their several
attributes and characteristics before they became connected by marriage,
and time makes them better acquainted--very curious, indeed!

An American essayist, writing on this point, says--"When your mother
came and told her mother that she was _engaged_, and your grandmother
told your grandfather, how much did they know of the intimate nature of
the young gentleman to whom she had pledged her existence? I will not
be so hard as to ask how