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do not intend to repeat all the stale old saws of out-of-date wiseacres.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; everyone 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 proverb from a man is to know him
at once for a phonographic kind of fool. The fundamental and enduring
grace of womanhood goes down to the skeleton; you cannot have a pretty
face without a pretty skull, just as you cannot have one without a good
temper.

Yet all the same there is an excellent reason why one should shun beauty
in a prospective wife, at anyrate obvious beauty--the kind of beauty
people talk about, and which gets into the photographers' windows. The
common beautiful woman has a style of her own, a favourite aspect. After
all, she cannot be perfect. She comes upon you, dazzles you, marries
you; there is a time of ecstasy. People envy you, continue to envy you.
After a time you envy yourself--yourself of the day before yesterday.
For the imperfection, the inevitable imperfection--in one case I
remember it was a smile--becomes visible to you, becomes your especial
privilege. That is the real reason. No beauty is a beauty to her
husband. But with the plain woman--the thoroughly plain woman--it is
different. At first--I will not mince matters--her ugliness is an
impenetrable repulse. Face it. After a time little things begin to
appear through the violent discords: little