usion."
MOLIERE. _Les Precieuses Ridicules._

It would be a little hard to blame the rector of Pennicote that in the
course of looking at things from every point of view, he looked at
Gwendolen as a girl likely to make a brilliant marriage. Why should he
be expected to differ from his contemporaries in this matter, and wish
his niece a worse end of her charming maidenhood than they would
approve as the best possible? It is rather to be set down to his credit
that his feelings on the subject were entirely good-natured. And in
considering the relation of means to ends, it would have been mere
folly to have been guided by the exceptional and idyllic--to have
recommended that Gwendolen should wear a gown as shabby as Griselda's
in order that a marquis might fall in love with her, or to have
insisted that since a fair maiden was to be sought, she should keep
herself out of the way. Mr. Gascoigne's calculations were of the kind
called rational, and he did not even think of getting a too frisky
horse in order that Gwendolen might be threatened with an accident and
be rescued by a man of property. He wished his niece well, and he meant
her to be seen to advantage in the best society of the neighborhood.

Her uncle's intention fell in perfectly with Gwendolen's own wishes.
But let no one suppose that she also contemplated a brilliant marriage
as the direct end of her witching the world with her grace on
horseback, or with any other accomplishment. That she was to be married
some time or other she would have felt obliged to admit; and that her
marriage would not be of a middling kind, such as most girls were
contented with, she felt quietly, unargumentatively sure. But her
thoughts never dwelt on marriage as the fulfillment of her ambition;
the dramas in which she imagined herself a heroine were not wrought up
to that close. To be very much sued or hopelessly sighed for as a bride
was indeed an indispensable and agreeable guarantee of womanly power;
but to become a wife and wear all the domestic fetters of that
condition, was on the whole a vexatious necessity. Her observation of
matrimony had inclined her to think it rather a dreary state in which a
woman could not do what she liked, had more children than were
desirable, was consequently dull, and became irrevocably immersed in
humdrum. Of course marriage was social promotion; she could not look
forward to a single life; but promotions have som