On the Choice of a Wife - Page 2

scraps of melody--a shy
tenderness in her smile that peeps out at you and vanishes, a something
that is winning, looking out of her eyes. You find a waviness of her
hair that you never saw at the beginning, a certain surprising,
pleasing, enduring want of clumsiness in part of her ear. And it is
yours. You can see she strikes the beholder with something of a shock;
and while the beauty of the beauty is common for all the world to
rejoice in, you will find in your dear, plain wife beauty enough and to
spare; exquisite--for it is all your own, your treasure-trove, your
safely-hidden treasure....

Then, in the matter of age; though young fellows do not imagine it, it
is very easy to marry a wife too young. Marriage has been defined as a
foolish bargain in which one man provides for another man's daughter,
but there is no reason why this should go so far as completing her
education. If your conception of happiness is having something pretty
and innocent and troublesome about you, something that you can cherish
and make happy, a pet rabbit is in every way preferable. At the worst
that will nibble your boots. I have known several cases of the
girl-wife, and it always began like an idyll, charmingly; the tenderest
care on one hand, winsome worship on the other--until some little thing,
a cut chin or a missing paper, startled the pure and natural man out of
his veneer, dancing and blaspheming, with the most amazing consequences.
Only a proven saint should marry a girl-wife, and his motives might be
misunderstood. The idyllic wife is a beautiful thing to read about, but
in practice idylls should be kept episodes; in practice the idyllic life
is a little too like a dinner that is all dessert. A common man, after a
time, tires of winsome worship; he craves after companionship, and a
sympathy based on experience. The ordinary young man, with the still
younger wife, I have noticed, continues to love her with all his
heart--and spends his leisure telling somebody else's wife all about it.
If in these days of blatant youth an experienced man's counsel is worth
anything, it would be to marry a woman considerably older than oneself,
if one must marry at all. And while upon this topic--and I have lived
long--the ideal wife, I am persuaded, from the close observation of many
years, is invariably, by some mishap, a widow....

Avoid social charm. It was the capacity for entertaining visitors that
ruined Paradise. It grows upon a woman. An indiscriminating personal
magnetism is perhaps the most dreadful vice a wife can have. You think
you have married the one woman in the world, and you find you have
married a host--that is to say, a hostess. Instead of making a home for
you she makes you something between an ethnographical