The man whom you marry must, of course, have an income; he should have a better social position than you have any right to expect.  You know all that—­it is a commonplace.  But also he must be perfectly even.  In everything he should remind you constantly of most other men.  Everything in him and about him should be uniform.  Even his sins should be so monotonous that it is impossible to call them romantic.  Avoid the romantic.  Shun supreme moments.  Chocolate-creams are very well, but as a daily food dry toast is better.  Seek for the man who has the qualities of dry toast—­a hard exterior manner, and an interior temperament that is at once soft and insipid.  The man that I describe is amenable to flattery, even as dry toast is amenable to butter.  You can guide him.  And, as he never varies, you can calculate upon him.  Marry the dry-toast man.  He is easy to obtain.  There are hundreds of him in Piccadilly.  None of them wants to marry, and all of them will.  He gives no trouble.  He will go to the Club when he wants to talk, and to the theatre when he wants to be amused.  He will come to you when he wants absolutely nothing; and in you—­if you are the well-bred English girl that I am supposing—­he will assuredly find it.  And so you will both be contented.

Do not think that I am, for one moment, depreciating sentiment.  I worship it; I am a sentimentalist myself.  But everything has its place, and sentiment of this kind belongs to young unmarried life—­to the period when you are engaged, or when you ought to be engaged.  The young man whom I have described—­the crisp, perfect, insipid, dry-toast man—­would only be bored by a wife who wanted to be on sentimental terms with him.  I remember a case in point.  A young girl, whom I knew intimately, married a man who was, as a husband, perfect.  They lived happily enough for three or four years; she had a couple of children, a beautiful house, everything that could be desired.  And then the trouble came.  She had been reading trashy novels, I suppose; at any rate, she fell in love with her own husband.  She went in daily dread that he would find it out.  I argued with her, reasoned with her, entreated her to give up such ruinous folly.  It was of no use.  She wrote him letters—­three sheets, crossed and underlined.  I warned her that sooner or later he would read one of them.  He did; and he never forgave her.  That happy home is all broken up now—­simply because that woman could not remember that there is a time for sentiment and a time for propriety, and that marriage is the time for propriety.  The passions are all very well until you are married; but the fashions will last you all your life.

I have no more to say on the choice of a husband.  It is quite the simplest thing that a young girl has to learn,—­you must find a quite colourless person, and flatter him a little; his vanity will do the rest.  And when you are married to him, you will find him much easier to tolerate than a man who has any strong characteristic.  Do not get into the habit of thinking marriage important; it is only important in so far as it affects externals; it need not touch the interior of your life.