Honest John, thrusting his hands well towards the bottom of his pockets, smiles sheepishly, yet knowingly, in listening to this “discourse.”  Courtship is one thing and marriage is another in his code.  Mary’s primal mistake is in assuming—­(upon John’s authority, I regret as his advocate to say), that the two states are one and the same.  Moonlight vows and noonday action should, according to her theory, be in exact harmony.  John does not deceive consciously.  Wemmick’s office tenets differed diametrically from those he held at Walworth where his aged parent toasted the muffins, and Miss.  Skiffins made the tea.  The mellow fervency of John’s “With all my worldly goods I thee endow”—­must be taken in a Pickwickian and Cupidian sense.  Reason and experience sustain him in the belief that a tyro should learn a business before being put in charge of important interests.  Mary is a tyro whose abilities and discretion he must test before—­in the words of the old song—­he

    “gives her the key of his chest,
    To get the gold at her request.”

Most women take to married and home-life easily, because naturally.  The shadow of the roof-tree, the wholesome restraint of household routine and the peaceful monotony of household tasks accord well with preconceived ideas and early education.  John’s liking for domesticity is usually an acquired taste, like that for olives and caviare, and to gain aptitude for the duties it involves, requires patience.  He needs filing down and chinking, and rounding off, and sand-papering before he fits decorously into the chimney-corner.  And when there, he sometimes does not “season straight.”  He was hewed across the grain, or the native grain ran awry, or there is a knot in the wood.

“Why were those newel posts oiled before they were set up?” I asked of a carpenter.

“T’ keep’em from checkin’, to be sure.”

“Checking?”

“Yes, ma’am.  Goin’ in shaller cracks all over, ’s wood’s apt to do without it’s properly treated beforehand.  Sometimes ’twould crack clean through ef ’twarnt for the ile.”

In his new position John is apt “to go in shaller cracks all over,” unless his feminine trainer has been judicious in the use of lubricants—­assuasive and dissuasive.  If handled aright by the owner he, to do him justice, rarely “cracks clean through.”

“Checking” in this case signifies the lack of the small, sweet courtesies which are the peaceable fruits of the Gospel of Conventionality.  Breeding, good or bad, environs the growing lad, as Wordsworth tells us heaven lies about us in our infancy.  The boy whose mother allows him to lounge into her presence with his cap upon his head, whose sisters wink indulgently at his shirt sleeves in parlor and at table—­will don his hat and doff his coat in his wife’s sitting-room.  Politeness, like gingerbread, is only excellent when home-made, and is not to be bought for money.