on your own authority: God made you, but you marry yourself; and
for all that your wife suffers, no one is responsible but you. A man
must be very certain of his knowledge ere he undertake to guide a
ticket-of-leave man through a dangerous pass; you have eternally missed
your way in life, with consequences that you still deplore, and yet you
masterfully seize your wife's hand, and, blindfold, drag her after you
to ruin. And it is your wife, you observe, whom you select. Her, whose
happiness you most desire, you choose to be your victim. You would
earnestly warn her from a tottering bridge or bad investment. If she
were to marry some one else, how you would tremble for her fate! If she
were only your sister, and you thought half as much of her, how
doubtfully would you entrust her future to a man no better than
yourself!

Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path
meadows where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and
straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and
even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you
have a wife to support. Suppose, after you are married, one of those
little slips were to befall you. What happened last November might
surely happen February next. They may have annoyed you at the time,
because they were not what you had meant; but how will they annoy you in
the future, and how will they shake the fabric of your wife's confidence
and peace! A thousand things unpleasing went on in the _chiaroscuro_ of
a life that you shrank from too particularly realising; you did not
care, in those days, to make a fetish of your conscience; you would
recognise your failures with a nod, and so, good day. But the time for
these reserves is over. You have wilfully introduced a witness into your
life, the scene of these defeats, and can no longer close the mind's eye
upon uncomely passages, but must stand up straight and put a name upon
your actions. And your witness is not only the judge, but the victim of
your sins; not only can she condemn you to the sharpest penalties, but
she must herself share feelingly in their endurance. And observe, once
more, with what temerity you have chosen precisely _her_ to be your spy,
whose esteem you value highest, and whom you have already taught to
think you better than you are. You may think you had a conscience and
believed in God; but what is a conscience to a wife? Wise men of yore
erected statue