ON THE CHOICE OF A WIFE
Wife-choosing is an unending business. This sounds immoral, but what I mean will be clearer in the context. People have lived—innumerable people—exhausted experience, and yet other people keep on coming to hand, none the wiser, none the better. It is like a waterfall more than anything else in the world. Every year one has to turn to and warn another batch about these stale old things. Yet it is one's duty—the last thing that remains to a man. And as a piece of worldly wisdom that has nothing to do with wives, always leave a few duties neglected for the comfort of your age. There are such a lot of other things one can do when one is young.
Now the kind of wife a young fellow of eight or nine and twenty insists on selecting is something of one and twenty or less, inexperienced, extremely pretty, graceful, and well dressed, not too clever, accomplished—but I need not go on, for the youthful reader can fill in the picture himself from his own ideal. Every young man has his own ideal as a matter of course, and they are all exactly alike. Now I do not intend to repeat all the stale old saws of out-of-date wiseacres. Most of them are even more foolish than the follies they reprove. Take for instance the statement that "beauty fades." Absurd; every one knows perfectly well that as the years creep on beauty simply gets more highly coloured. And then, "beauty is only skin-deep." Fantastically wrong! Some of it is not that; and for the rest, is a woman like a toy balloon?—just a surface? To hear that
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