89.  The things which you ought to desire in a wife are, 1.  Chastity; 2. sobriety; 3. industry; 4. frugality; 5. cleanliness; 6. knowledge of domestic affairs; 7. good temper; 8. beauty.

90.  CHASTITY, perfect modesty, in word, deed, and even thought, is so essential, that, without it, no female is fit to be a wife.  It is not enough that a young woman abstain from everything approaching towards indecorum in her behaviour towards men; it is, with me, not enough that she cast down her eyes, or turn aside her head with a smile, when she hears an indelicate allusion:  she ought to appear not to understand it, and to receive from it no more impression than if she were a post.  A loose woman is a disagreeable acquaintance:  what must she be, then, as a wife?  Love is so blind, and vanity is so busy in persuading us that our own qualities will be sufficient to ensure fidelity, that we are very apt to think nothing, or, at any rate, very little, of trifling symptoms of levity; but if such symptoms show themselves now, we may be well assured, that we shall never possess the power of effecting a cure.  If prudery mean false modesty, it is to be despised; but if it mean modesty pushed to the utmost extent, I confess that I like it.  Your ‘free and hearty’ girls I have liked very well to talk and laugh with; but never, for one moment, did it enter into my mind that I could have endured a ‘free and hearty’ girl for a wife.  The thing is, I repeat, to last for life; it is to be a counterbalance for troubles and misfortunes; and it must, therefore, be perfect, or it had better not be at all.  To say that one despises jealousy is foolish; it is a thing to be lamented; but the very elements of it ought to be avoided.  Gross indeed is the beast, for he is unworthy of the name of man; nasty indeed is the wretch, who can even entertain the thought of putting himself between a pair of sheets with a wife of whose infidelity he possesses the proof; but, in such cases, a man ought to be very slow to believe appearances; and he ought not to decide against his wife but upon the clearest proof.  The last, and, indeed, the only effectual safeguard is, to begin well; to make a good choice; to let the beginning be such as to render infidelity and jealousy next to impossible.  If you begin in grossness; if you couple yourself on to one with whom you have taken liberties, infidelity is the natural and just consequence.  When a Peer of the realm, who had not been over-fortunate in his matrimonial affairs, was urging MAJOR CARTWRIGHT to seek for nothing more than ‘moderate reform,’ the Major (forgetting the domestic circumstances of his Lordship) asked him how he should relish ‘moderate chastity’ in a wife!  The bare use of the two words, thus coupled together, is sufficient to excite disgust.  Yet with this ‘moderate chastity’ you must be, and ought to be, content,