stand.
His balance at the banker's is a fact; his good name and credit with the
tradespeople is a fact; so is the comfort of his home; so are the
health, the morals, the education of his children. All these are the
true realities of life to him; but the beauty which changes to deformity
by the small-pox, which fades under dyspepsia, grows stale by habit, and
is worn threadbare by the end of twenty years, is only a skin-deep grace
which he does not value. Perhaps he is right. Certainly, some of the
happiest marriages among one's acquaintances are those where the wife
has not one perceptible physical charm, and where the whole force of her
magnetic value lies in what she is, not in how she looks.

Another man wants a tender, adoring, fair-haired seraph, who will
worship him as a demigod, and accept him as her best revelation of
strength and wisdom. The more dependent she is, the better he will love
her; the less of conscious thought, of active will, of originative power
she has, the greater his regard and tenderness. To be the one sole
teacher and protector of such a gentle little creature seems to him the
most delicious and the best condition of married life; and he holds
Milton's famous lines to be expressive of the only fitting relation
between men and women. The adoring seraph is his ideal; Griselda,
Desdemona, Lucy Ashton, are his highest culminations of womanly grace;
and the qualities which appeal the most powerfully to his generosity are
the patience which will not complain, the gentleness that cannot resent,
and the love which nothing can chill.

Another man wants a cultivated intelligence in his ideal. As an author,
an artist, a student, a statesman, he would like his wife to be able to
help him by the contact of bright wit and ready intellect. He believes
in the sex of minds, and holds only that work complete which has been
created by the one and perfected by the other. He sees how women have
helped on the leaders in troubled times; he knows that almost all great
men have owed something of their greatness to the influence of a mother
or a wife; he remembers how thoughts which had lain dumb in men's
brains for more than half their lifetime suddenly woke up into speech
and activity by the influence of a woman great enough to call them
forth. The adoring seraph would be an encumbrance, and nothing better
than a child upon his hands; and the soul which had to be awakened and
directed by him would run great chance