Ah, my dear young friend!  When your mamma then, if you will believe it, a very slight young lady, with very pretty hair and figure—­came and told her mamma that your papa had—­had—­asked No, no, no! she could n’t say it; but her mother—­oh the depth of maternal sagacity!—­guessed it all without another word!—­When your mother, I say, came and told her mother she was engaged, and your grandmother told your grandfather, how much did they know of the intimate nature of the young gentleman to whom she had pledged her existence?  I will not be so hard as to ask how much your respected mamma knew at that time of the intimate nature of your respected papa, though, if we should compare a young girl’s man-as-she-thinks-him with a forty-summered matron’s man-as-she-finds-him, I have my doubts as to whether the second would be a facsimile of the first in most cases.

The idea that in this world each young person is to wait until he or she finds that precise counterpart who alone of all creation was meant for him or her, and then fall instantly in love with it, is pretty enough, only it is not Nature’s way.  It is not at all essential that all pairs of human beings should be, as we sometimes say of particular couples, “born for each other.”  Sometimes a man or a woman is made a great deal better and happier in the end for having had to conquer the faults of the one beloved, and make the fitness not found at first, by gradual assimilation.  There is a class of good women who have no right to marry perfectly good men, because they have the power of saving those who would go to ruin but for the guiding providence of a good wife.  I have known many such cases.  It is the most momentous question a woman is ever called upon to decide, whether the faults of the man she loves are beyond remedy and will drag her down, or whether she is competent to be his earthly redeemer and lift him to her own level.

A person of genius should marry a person of character.  Genius does not herd with genius.  The musk-deer and the civet-cat are never found in company.  They don’t care for strange scents,—­they like plain animals better than perfumed ones.  Nay, if you will have the kindness to notice, Nature has not gifted my lady musk-deer with the personal peculiarity by which her lord is so widely known.

Now when genius allies itself with character, the world is very apt to think character has the best of the bargain.  A brilliant woman marries a plain, manly fellow, with a simple intellectual mechanism;—­we have all seen such cases.  The world often stares a good deal and wonders.  She should have taken that other, with a far more complex mental machinery.  She might have had a watch with the philosophical compensation-balance, with the metaphysical index which can split a second into tenths, with the musical chime which can turn every quarter of an hour into melody.  She has chosen a plain one, that keeps good time, and that is all.