w that as a rule the practice has been found to answer. It is
open, in the first place, to this objection,--that the moulder does
not generally conceive such idea very early in life, and the idea
when conceived must necessarily be carried out on a young subject.
Such a plan is the result of much deliberate thought, and has
generally arisen from long observation, on the part of the thinker,
of the unhappiness arising from marriages in which there has been no
moulding. Such a frame of mind comes upon a bachelor, perhaps about
his thirty-fifth year, and then he goes to work with a girl of
fourteen. The operation takes some ten years, at the end of which the
moulded bride regards her lord as an old man. On the whole I think
that the ordinary plan is the better, and even the safer. Dance
with a girl three times, and if you like the light of her eye and
the tone of voice with which she, breathless, answers your little
questions about horseflesh and music--about affairs masculine and
feminine,--then take the leap in the dark. There is danger, no doubt;
but the moulded wife is, I think, more dangerous.

With Felix Graham the matter was somewhat different, seeing that he
was not yet thirty, and that the lady destined to be the mistress
of his family had already passed through three or four years of her
noviciate. He had begun to be prudent early in life; or had become
prudent rather by force of sentiment than by force of thought. Mary
Snow was the name of his bride-elect; and it is probable that, had
not circumstances thrown Mary Snow in his way, he would not have gone
out of his way to seek a subject for his experiment. Mary Snow was
the daughter of an engraver,--not of an artist who receives four or
five thousand pounds for engraving the chef-d'oeuvre of a modern
painter,--but of a man who executed flourishes on ornamental cards
for tradespeople, and assisted in the illustration of circus
playbills. With this man Graham had become acquainted through certain
transactions of his with the press, and had found him to be a
widower, drunken, dissolute, and generally drowned in poverty. One
child the man had, and that child was Mary Snow.

How it came to pass that the young barrister first took upon himself
the charge of maintaining and educating this poor child need not now
be told. His motives had been thoroughly good, and in the matter he
had endeavoured to act the part of a kind Samaritan. He had found her
pretty, half starved,