ime? If we are so clever as to be bored by ordinary
women, why cannot our cleverness find out the feminine cleverness which
would respond to it?

What I am going to say now is in its very nature incapable of proof, and
yet the longer I live the more the truth of it is "borne in upon me." I
feel convinced that for every grade of the masculine intellect there
exists a corresponding grade of the feminine intellect, so that a
precisely suitable intellectual marriage is always possible for every
one. But since the higher intellects are rare, and rare in proportion to
their elevation, it follows that the difficulty of finding the true mate
increases with the mental strength and culture of the man. If the
"mental princes," as Blake called himself, are to marry the mental
princesses, they will not always discover them quite so easily as kings'
sons find kings' daughters.

This difficulty of finding the true mate is the real reason why so many
clever men marry silly or stupid women. The women about them seem to be
all very much alike, mentally; it seems hopeless to expect any real
companionship, and the clever men are decided by the color of a girl's
eyes, or a thousand pounds more in her dowry, or her relationship to a
peer of the realm.

It was remarked to me by a French university professor, that although
men in his position had on the whole much more culture than the middle
class, they had an extraordinary talent for winning the most vulgar and
ignorant wives. The explanation is, that their marriages are not
intellectual marriages at all. The class of French professors is not
advantageously situated; it has not great facilities for choice. Their
incomes are so small that, unless helped by private means, the first
thing they can prudently look to in a wife is her utility as a domestic
servant, which, in fact, it is her destiny to become. The intellectual
disparity is from the beginning likely to be very great, because the
professor is confined to the country-town where his _Lycee_ happens to
be situated, and in that town he does not always see the most cultivated
society. He may be an intellectual prince, but where is he to find his
princess? The marriage begins without the idea of intellectual
companionship, and it continues as it began. The girl was uneducated: it
seems hopeless to try to educate the woman; and then there is the
supreme difficulty, only to be overcome by two wills at once most
resolute and most persisten