principle is the same.  When the woman settles in her new home, she is free from sordid anxieties, and she can give the graces of her mind play.  How beautiful some such households are!  An old railway-guard once said to me—­“Ah, there’s no talk like your own wife’s when she understands you, and you sit one side of the fire, and she the other!  It don’t matter what kind of day you’ve had, she puts all right.”  The man was right—­the most delightful conversation that can be held is between a rational man and woman who love each other, who understand each other, and who have sufficient worldly keenness to keep clear of lowering cares.  A man rightly mated feels it an absolute delight to confide the innermost secrets of life to his wife; and the woman would feel almost criminal if she kept the pettiest of petty secrets from her partner.  They are friends, gloriously mated, and all the glories of birth and state ever imagined cannot equal their simple but perfect joy.  When the tired mechanic comes home at night and meets one whom he has wisely chosen, he forgets his sharp day of labour as soon as his overalls are off.  No snappish word greets him; and he is incapable of being ill-natured with the kind soul whom he worships in his rough way.  I have always found that the merriest and most profitable evenings were passed in houses where neither of the principal parties strove for mastery, and where the woman had the art of coaxing imperceptibly and discreetly.  I reject the suggestion made by cynic men that no married pair can live without quarrelling.  No married pair who were fools before marriage can avoid dissension; but, when man and wife make their choice wisely and cautiously, the notion of a quarrel is too horrible to dream of.

IX.

SHREWS.

The greatest masters who ever made studies of the shrew in fiction or in history have never, after all, given us a strictly scientific definition of the creature.  They let her exhibit herself in all her drollery or her hatefulness, but they act in somewhat lordly fashion by leaving us to frame our definition from the picturesque data which they supply.  Mrs. Mackenzie, in “The Newcomes,” is repulsive to an awful degree, but the figure is as true as true can be, and most of us, no doubt, have seen the type in all its loathsomeness only too many times.  Mrs. Mackenzie is a shrew of one sort, but we could not take her vile personality as the basis of a classification.  Mrs. Raddle is one of that lower middle-class which Dickens knew so well, still she is not hateful or vile, or anything but droll.  I know how maddening that kind of woman can be in real life to those immediately about her, but onlookers find her purely funny; they never think of poor Bob Sawyer’s cruel humiliation; they only laugh themselves helpless over the screeching little woman on the stairs, who humbles her wretched consort and routs the party with such consummate strategy.