would he not make a great mistake?"

I was silenced.

In "Fors Clavigera," Letter LIX, the author says: "I never wrote a letter
in my life which all the world is not welcome to read." From this one
might imagine that Mr. Ruskin never loved--no pressed flowers in books;
no passages of poetry double-marked and scored; no bundles of letters
faded and yellow, sacred for his own eye, tied with white or dainty blue
ribbon; no little nothings hidden away in the bottom of a trunk. And yet
Mr. Ruskin has his ideas on the woman question, and very positive ideas
they are too--often sweetly sympathetic and wisely helpful.

I see that one of the encyclopedias mentions Ruskin as a bachelor, which
is giving rather an extended meaning to the word, for although Mr. Ruskin
married, he was not mated. According to Collingwood's account, this
marriage was a quiet arrangement between parents. Anyway, the genius is
like the profligate in this: when he marries he generally makes a woman
miserable. And misery is reactionary as well as infectious. Ruskin is a
genius.

Genius is unique. No satisfactory analysis of it has yet been given. We
know a few of its indications--that's all. First among these is ability
to concentrate.

No seed can sow genius; no soil can grow it: its quality is inborn and
defies both cultivation and extermination. To be surpassed is never
pleasant; to feel your inferiority is to feel a pang. Seldom is there a
person great enough to find satisfaction in the success of a friend. The
pleasure that excellence gives is oft tainted by resentment; and so the
woman who marries a genius is usually unhappy.

Genius is excess: it is obstructive to little plans. It is difficult to
warm yourself at a conflagration; the tempest may blow you away; the sun
dazzles; lightning seldom strikes gently; the Nile overflows. Genius has
its times of straying off into the infinite--and then what is the good
wife to do for companionship? Does she protest, and find fault? It could
not be otherwise, for genius is dictatorial without knowing it,
obstructive without wishing to be, intolerant unawares, and unsocial
because it can not help it.

The wife of a genius sometimes takes his fits of abstraction for
stupidity, and having the man's interests at heart she endeavors to
arouse him from his lethargy by chiding him. Occasionally he arouses
enough to chide back; and so it has become an axiom that genius is not
domestic.

A short period of mi