run be worth the girl's while to be
beguiled by a man's money, his position or his prospects, since all of
these, without the one thing needful, will ultimately fail her.

The truth is that very few girls realize how intimate and urgent and
inevitable and unintermittent are the conditions of married life. It
requires imagination, of course, to understand these things without
experience. A girl observes a friend who has made what is called "a good
marriage"; she goes to the friend's house, and sees her the triumphant
mistress of a large establishment; she sees her friend at the theatre,
meets her escorted by her husband at this place and that; hears of her
holidays abroad, covets her jewelry, and she thinks how delightful it
must be. She knows nothing at all of the realities; she sees only
externals, and she is misled. Whenever thus misled she is beguiled into
marrying a man for any other reason than that his personal qualities
compel her love, it is her seniors who are to blame for not having
enlightened her. Such a girl shall be enlightened if her eyes fall on
these pages.

Happiness does not consist in external things at all. This is not to
deny that external things may largely contribute to happiness if its
primal conditions be first satisfied. Failing those primal conditions,
externals are a mockery and a burden. In the case of the vast majority
of married people we see only what they choose that we shall see.
Almost everyone is concerned with keeping up appearances. Things may be
and very often are what they appear, but very often they are not. Any
woman of nice feeling is very much concerned to keep up appearances in
the matter of her marriage. A few or none may guess her secret, but
whatever we see, it is what we do not see--no matter how close our
friendship may be--that determines the success or failure of marriage.
The moments that really count are just those which we do not witness,
and such moments are many in married life, or should be. If the marriage
is what it ought to be, there is a vital communion, grave and gay, which
occupies every available part of life. Only the persons immediately
concerned really know how much of this they have or, if they have it
not, what they have in its place. But we may be well assured that, as
every married person knows, it is the personal qualities that matter
everything in this most intimate sphere of life, and naught else matters
at all. When the girl marries so as to