In seeing Lydia you would make the mistake that you usually make in judging girls:  entering among them, you think their attitudes proclaim their traits.  For instance, you take the most giggling one for a simpleton, but afterward learn that she is a good scholar and has accepted the Greek chair in a Western college, and looking again you see she has a strong frame, a capable head and large bright eyes.  Lydia dressed in the mode, wore the high-heeled shoes that give such a dainty look to the foot and gait, and came into a room with a great effusion of fashionableness; yet she was not in the least what she seemed.  She had a great deal of what is more pleasing than mere appearance, and that is character.  She was ambitious and energetic.  She did tatting when she did nothing else—­said it concealed her lack of repose and liability to fidget.  She was able to draw la quintessence de tout:  she could make a mountain-spring of a mole-hill.  She also had a touch of temper:  those who are perfectly amiable are nothing else.

I was a youth blue-eyed and fair of face, tall, thin and having a complying spirit that has been—­But let me not anticipate.  The race after fashion ever wearied me—­I shall stop early at some standing-collar or heavy-neckcloth period—­and I never cared much for money—­could live with it or without it, desiring “this man’s art or that man’s scope” rather than his cash.  There is such a great majority of poor folks, I expected to be one of them; still, I had a taste for honesty, asked favors of nobody, considered the least debt a degradation, and thought myself better than most rich people.  I was of the family and the religion of Plato, who peddled oil to pay his expenses while travelling in Egypt.

We discover in others what they most wish to hide:  therefore I early discovered that Lydia’s mother, who had a large girl-family, and who knew that the supply of some one to love greatly exceeds the demand, was anxious to secure me as a son-in-law.  I was glad of it, for, let poets and novelists say what they will, the young fellow who marries with the approval of friends drifts happily on, while the rash boy who weds against the good sense of his elders is dragged bleeding along a rough way.  So I married Lydia, and began life in gladness and content.  I liked her family and they liked me.  It puzzles me to see how the English mother-in-law, who is a grum-voiced, dogmatic and belligerent person with a jointure to bequeath, came to be engrafted on our literature.  The inoffensive delicacy of an American elderly woman forbids her the role of her British sister.  Our mother-in-law troubles are mostly confined to our low foreign population.  Neither have we a character similar to the silly, spiteful, dried-up old maid of English literature and its American imitations, our spinsters being generally stout and jolly personages and rather over-fond of children.  My mother-in-law was very nice, and we were the best of friends.