“But, my darling, Colin and Chloe cannot spend their whole lives singing madrigals and stringing daisies.  It is not in human nature to support, for any length of time, such superhuman bliss.  The time will come when Colin will find no more rhymes to ‘dove,’ and when Chloe will tire of hearing the same one.  It is possible that Herbert will some time tire of reading Shelley to you,—­nay, it is even possible that the time may come when you will tire of hearing him; it is of that time I would talk.  The present is as perfectly satisfactory to me as to you and Herbert, though not exactly in the same degree.”

“Well, Uncle, what is your advice to Chloe disillusioned,—­if you insist that such a thing must be?”

“Simply this, my own dear little child,” answered Uncle John, and his voice took almost a solemn tone in its deep tenderness,—­“when that time comes, as come it must, do not worry your husband with idle regrets for the past; remember that the husband is not the lover; remember that your sex love through your imagination, and look always for that clothing and refining of passion with sentiment, which, with us, belong only to the poetry and chivalry of youthful ardor.  We may love you as well afterward,—­nay, we may love you a great deal better,—­but we cannot take the trouble of telling you so every day; we expect you to believe it once for all; and you,—­you like to hear it over and over again, and, not hearing it, you begin to fancy it no longer true, and fall to trying experiments on your happiness.  A fatal error this, Alice.  There is nothing that men so often enjoy as the simply being let alone; but not one woman in a hundred can be made to believe in such a strange enjoyment.  Then the wife becomes exigeante and impatient, and the husband, after fruitless attempts to find out what he has done, never suspecting that the real trouble is what he has left undone, finds her unreasonable, and begins to harden himself to griefs which he classes, like Miss Edgeworth, under the head of ‘Sorrows of my Lord Plumcake.’”

“Miserable fate of the nobler sex, Uncle,—­disturbed, even in the sublime heights of philosophical self-possession, by the follies and unreasonablenesses of the weaker vessel!  I suppose you allow men to live out their natures unrebuked, while women must live down theirs?”

“Not I, Alice,—­but I am by nature a special pleader, and, just now, I am engaged on Herbert’s side of the case.  Fee me well, my darling, by a kiss or a merry look, and bring Herbert up to judgment, and I will tell him home truths too.”

“Let me hear your argument for the other side, most subtile of reasoners, and I may, perhaps, be able to repeat them at second-hand, when occasion calls for them.”