its
advantages.

The worst of bores is restrained by courtesy from boring you if you give
him no cue for further conversation, and the plea of utter ignorance
which an English girl can commonly advance on any subject is at any rate
a defence against the worst pests of society. On the other hand, the
ingenuous confession that she really knows nothing about it can be
turned by a smile into a prelude to the most engaging conversation, and
into an implied flattery of the neatest kind to the favored being whose
superiority is acknowledged. Ignorance, in fact, of this winsome order
is one of the stock weapons of the feminine armory.

The man who looks philosophically back after marriage to discover why on
earth he is married at all will generally find that the mischief began
in the _naive_ confession on the part of his future wife of a total
ignorance which asked humbly for enlightenment. One of the grandest
_coups_ we ever knew made in this way was effected by a desire on the
part of a faded beauty to know the pedigree of a horse. The pride of her
next neighbor at finding himself the possessor of knowledge on any
subject on earth took the form of the most practical gratitude a man can
show. But it is not before marriage only that woman finds her ignorance
act as a charm. Husbands find pleasure in talking politics to their
wives simply because, as they stand on the hearthrug, they are
displaying their own mental superiority. An Englishman likes to be
master of his own house, but he dearly loves to be schoolmaster.

A Platonic woman as well-informed as her husband would deprive him of
this daily source of domestic enjoyment; his lecture would be reduced to
discussion, and to discussion in which he might be defeated. To rob him
of his oracular infallibility might greatly improve the husband, but it
would revolutionize the character of the home.

It is difficult to see at first sight any analogy between the
Puritanical form of flirtation which calls itself a Platonic attachment,
and the provisions by which Plato excluded all peculiar love or
matrimonial choice from his commonwealth. The likeness is really to be
found in the resolve on which both are based to obtain all the
advantages of social intercourse between the sexes without the
interference of passion. In a well-regulated State, no doubt, passion is
a bore, and this is just the aspect which it takes to a highly regulated
woman. An outburst of affection on the part of