if there is any finer school for
married life than a full course of love-letters. But if the marriage
follow immediately on the engagement, all love-letters and all
love-making must necessarily have a flavor of furniture and dress, and
of "considerations." I admit that love-making is an unreasonable and
impractical piece of business; but in this lies all its charm. It
delights in asserting the incredible and believing the impossible.
But, after all, it is in the depths of this delicious foolishness that
the heart attains its noblest growth. Life may have many grander hopes
and calmer joys in store,--

"But there's nothing half so sweet in life
As Love's young dream."

Therefore we ought to look with complaisance, if not with approbation,
on young people serenely passing through this phase of their
existence; but the fact is, we are apt to regard it as a little trial.
Lovers are so happy and self-satisfied that they do not understand
why everybody else is not in the same supreme condition. If the house
is ever so small, they expect a clear room to themselves.

Yet such an engagement, of reasonable length, is to be advised
wherever young people are tender and constant in nature, and really in
love with each other. I would only ask them to be as little
demonstrative in public as possible, and to carry their happiness
meekly, for, in any case, they will make large demands on the love,
patience, and toleration of their friends. But perhaps one of the
greatest advantages of a prolonged engagement is the security it
brings against a _mesalliance_. Now, to a man a _mesalliance_ is the
heaviest weight he can carry through life; but to a woman it is simply
destruction.

The best women have an instinctive wish to marry a man superior to
themselves in some way or other; for their honor is in their husbands,
and their status in society is determined by his. A woman who, for a
passing fancy, marries a man in any way her inferior wrongs herself,
her family, and her whole life; for the "grossness of his nature"
will most probably drag her to his level. Now and then a woman of
great force of character may lift her husband upward, but she accepts
such a labor at the peril of her own higher life. Should she find it
equally impossible to lift him to her level or to sink to his, what
remains? Life-long regrets, bitter shame and self-reproach, or a
forcible setting of herself free. But the latter, like all severe
remedies, carries