is a beautiful thing to read about, but in practice idylls should be kept episodes; in practice the idyllic life is a little too like a dinner that is all dessert.  A common man, after a time, tires of winsome worship; he craves after companionship, and a sympathy based on experience.  The ordinary young man, with the still younger wife, I have noticed, continues to love her with all his heart—­and spends his leisure telling somebody else’s wife all about it.  If in these days of blatant youth an experienced man’s counsel is worth anything, it would be to marry a woman considerably older than oneself, if one must marry at all.  And while upon this topic—­and I have lived long—­the ideal wife, I am persuaded, from the close observation of many years, is invariably, by some mishap, a widow....

Avoid social charm.  It was the capacity for entertaining visitors that ruined Paradise.  It grows upon a woman.  An indiscriminating personal magnetism is perhaps the most dreadful vice a wife can have.  You think you have married the one woman in the world, and you find you have married a host—­that is to say, a hostess.  Instead of making a home for you she makes you something between an ethnographical museum and a casual ward.  You find your rooms littered with people and teacups and things, strange creatures that no one could possibly care for, that seem scarcely to care for themselves.  You go about the house treading upon chance geniuses, and get tipped by inexperienced guests.  And even when she does not entertain, she is continually going out.  I do not deny that charming people are charming, that their company should be sought, but seeking it in marriage is an altogether different matter.

Then, I really must insist that young men do not understand the real truth about accomplishments.  There comes a day when the most variegated wife comes to the end of her tunes, and another when she ends them for the second time; Vita longa, ars brevis—­at least, as regards the art of the schoolgirl.  It is only like marrying a slightly more complicated barrel-organ.  And, for another point, watch the young person you would honour with your hand for the slightest inkling of economy or tidiness.  Young men are so full of poetry and emotion that it does not occur to them how widely the sordid vices are distributed in the other sex.  If you are a hotel proprietor, or a school proprietor, or a day labourer, such weaknesses become a strength, of course, but not otherwise.  For a literary person—­if perchance you are a literary person—­it is altogether too dreadful.  You are always getting swept and garnished, straightened up and sent out to be shaved.  And home—­even your study—­becomes a glittering, spick-and-span mechanism.  But you know the parable of the seven devils?