Matches are not all made in heaven.  Even the parlour variety sometimes smell of brimstone, and Cupid is blamed for many which are made by cupidity.  The gossips and the busybodies would die of mal-nutrition were it not for marriage and its complications.

[Sidenote:  The Tabbies]

Two people who have quarrelled cheerfully before marriage and whose engagement has been broken three or four times often surprise the tabbies who prophesy misfortune by settling down into post-nuptial content.  Two who are universally pronounced to be “perfectly suited to each other” are soon absolutely miserable.  Marriage is the one thing which everyone knows more about than people who are intimately concerned.

[Sidenote:  “Unequal Marriages”]

We hear a great deal of “unequal marriages,” not merely in degree of fortune, but in taste and mental equipment.  A man steeped to his finger-tips in the lore of the ancients chooses a pretty butterfly who does not know the difference between a hieroglyph and a Greek verb, and to whom Rome and Carthage are empty names.  His friends predict misery, and wonder at his blindness in passing by the young woman of equal outward charm who delivered a scholarly thesis at her commencement and has the degree of Master of Arts.

A talented woman marries a man without proportionate gifts and the tabbies call a special session.  It is decided at this conclave that “she is throwing herself away and will regret it.”  To everyone’s surprise, she is occasionally very happy with the man she has chosen, though about some things of no particular importance she knows much more than he.

The law of compensation is as certain in its action as that of gravitation, though it is not so widely understood.  Nature demands balance and equality.  She is constantly chiselling at the mountain to lower it to the level of the plain, and welding heterogeneous elements into homogeneous groups.

[Sidenote:  The Certain Instinct]

The pretty butterfly may easily prove a balance wheel to the man of much wisdom.  She will add a vivid human interest to his abstract pursuits and keep him from growing narrow-minded.  He chose the element he needed to make him symmetrical, with the certain instinct which impels isolated atoms of hydrogen and oxygen to combine in the proportion of two to one.

It never occurs to the tabbies that no talent or facility can ever stifle a woman’s nature.  The simple need of her heart is never taken into account in the criticism of these marriages which are deemed “unequal.”  If a woman holds an assistant professorship of mathematics in a university, it is a foregone conclusion that she should fall in love with someone who is proficient in trigonometry and holds his tangents and cosines in high esteem.  Happy evenings could then be spent with a book of logarithms and sheets of paper specially cut to accommodate a problem.

Similarity of tastes may sometimes prove an attraction, but very seldom similarity of pursuit.  Musicians do not often intermarry, and artists and writers are more apt to choose each other than exponents of their own cult.