Who lived for fashion, as he for power.

Maud, on the other hand,--

Wedded a man unlearned and poor,
And many children played round her door.

Probably in both cases this was for the best. Only the wildest
sentimentalist could in seriousness urge that Maud would have made a
good wife for the judge. Being a man who "lived for power," the
probable unpresentableness of Maud in a town house would have been a
constant thorn in his flesh. She could not appear barefooted at his
receptions, and the feet that have gone bare through an agricultural
girlhood do not readily adapt themselves to the size of shoe which
urban fashion dictates. Moreover, the vague yearnings of a young girl
for an alliance with a handsome stranger above her station, do not
fit her to speak the speech and think the thoughts and meet the social
demands of that station. No, Maud would have been a constant thorn in
the judge's side. Summer sunshine, the smell of hay, a drink of cold
water, a pretty, barefoot girl--the mood is compounded. An uneducated
farmer's daughter for a wife--the reality is accomplished.

And as for Maud, who will say for certain that she would not
eventually have eloped with the coachman because he praised her pies
instead of criticising her grammar?

So to each of them--barefoot girl and bald-headed judge (he probably
was bald-headed, though the poem omits to say so) did what was best,
and the school children for several generations have been taught to
waste unnecessary sympathy over their fate, have been inculcated with
a false view of the whole matter. Both of them found far more
happiness in dreaming of what might have been than ever they could
have found in the realization; for each of them this dream brought
undoubted sadness, but the sadness which is really pleasure, the
sadness, that is, which comes over all of us when "we realize that
though we have missed certain ideals in our lives we are still able to
recall those ideals, we are still not like all the dead, forgetful
clods around us, our wives and husbands and neighbors and friends. We
live with these people as one of them, of course, but we might have
been so much better than they! Such reflections as these are a great
comfort. They bring a sadness which makes us mournfully happy. They
reconcile us with the scheme of things. They are the outcroppings of
that secret vanity which the best and the worst of us nourish, and of
which is born our self-respect, our