"About as much religion as my William
likes," in short, that is what is necessary to make a happy couple of
any William and his spouse. For there are differences which no habit nor
affection can reconcile, and the Bohemian must not intermarry with the
Pharisee. Imagine Consuelo as Mrs. Samuel Budget, the wife of the
Successful Merchant! The best of men and the best of women may sometimes
live together all their lives, and for want of some consent on
fundamental questions, hold each other lost spirits to the end.

A certain sort of talent is almost indispensable for people who would
spend years together and not bore themselves to death. But the talent,
like the agreement, must be for and about life. To dwell happily
together they should be versed in the niceties of the heart, and born
with a faculty for willing compromise. The woman must be talented as a
woman, and it will not much matter although she is talented in nothing
else. She must know her _metier de femme_, and have a fine touch for the
affections. And it is more important that a person should be a good
gossip, and talk pleasantly and smartly of common friends and the
thousand and one nothings of the day and hour, than that she should
speak with the tongues of men and angels; for a while together by the
fire happens more frequently in marriage than the presence of a
distinguished foreigner to dinner. That people should laugh over the
same sort of jests, and have many a story of "grouse in the gun-room,"
many an old joke between them which time cannot wither nor custom stale,
is a better preparation for life, by your leave, than many other things
higher and better sounding in the world's ears. You could read Kant by
yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.
You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical
disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your
eyes or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way
towards a dissolution of the marriage.

I know a woman who, from some distaste or disability, could never so
much as understand the meaning of the word _politics_, and has given up
trying to distinguish Whigs from Tories; but take her on her own
politics, ask her about other men or women and the chicanery of everyday
existence--the rubs, the tricks, the vanities on which life turns--and
you will not find many more shrewd, trenchant, and humorous. Nay, to
make plainer what I