t time to teach his wife to know him as he was, and so
preferred to leave her with her own conception of him, rather than
disturb that conception when he believed it impossible to replace it by
a completely true one. We all act in that way with those whom we
consider _quite_ excluded from our private range of thought.

All this may be very prudent and wise: there may be degrees of conjugal
felicity, satisfactory in their way, without intellectual intercourse,
and yet I cannot think that any man of high culture could regard his
marriage as altogether a successful one so long as his wife remained
shut out from his mental life. Nor is the exclusion always quite
agreeable to the lady herself. A widow said to me that her husband had
never thought it necessary to try to raise her to his own level, yet she
believed that with his kindly help she might have attained it.

You with your masculine habits, may observe, as to this, that if the
lady had seriously cared to attain a higher level she might have
achieved it by her own private independent effort. But this is exactly
what the feminine nature never does. A clever woman is the best of
pupils, when she loves her teacher, but the worst of solitary learners.

It is not by adding to our knowledge, but by understanding us, that
women are our helpers. They understand us far better than men do, when
once they have the degree of preliminary information which enables them
to enter into our pursuits. Men are occupied with their personal works
and thoughts, and have wonderfully little sympathy left to enable them
to comprehend us; but a woman, by her divine sympathy--divine indeed,
since it was given by God for this--can enter into our inmost thought,
and make allowances for all our difficulties. Talk about your work and
its anxieties to a club of masculine friends, they will give very little
heed to you; they are all thinking about themselves, and they will
dislike your egotism because they have so much egotism of their own,
which yours invades and inconveniences. But talk in the same way to any
woman who has education enough to enable her to follow you, and she will
listen so kindly, and so very intelligently, that you will be betrayed
into interminable confidences.

Now, although an intellectual man may not care to make himself
understood by all the people in the street, it is not a good thing for
him to feel that he is understood by nobody. The intellectual life is
sometimes a fe