Ah, what a prize the man gets who wins a sweet bride like Hetty!  How the men envy him who come to the wedding breakfast, and see her hanging on his arm in her white lace and orange blossoms.  The dear, young, round, soft, flexible thing!  Her heart must be just as soft, her temper just as free from angles, her character just as pliant.  If anything ever goes wrong, it must be the husband’s fault there:  he can make her what he likes—­that is plain.  And the lover himself thinks so too:  the little darling is so fond of him, her little vanities are so bewitching, he wouldn’t consent to her being a bit wiser; those kittenlike glances and movements are just what one wants to make one’s hearth a paradise.  Every man under such circumstances is conscious of being a great physiognomist.  Nature, he knows, has a language of her own, which she uses with strict veracity, and he considers himself an adept in the language.  Nature has written out his bride’s character for him in those exquisite lines of cheek and lip and chin, in those eyelids delicate as petals, in those long lashes curled like the stamen of a flower, in the dark liquid depths of those wonderful eyes.  How she will dote on her children!  She is almost a child herself, and the little pink round things will hang about her like florets round the central flower; and the husband will look on, smiling benignly, able, whenever he chooses, to withdraw into the sanctuary of his wisdom, towards which his sweet wife will look reverently, and never lift the curtain.  It is a marriage such as they made in the golden age, when the men were all wise and majestic and the women all lovely and loving.

It was very much in this way that our friend Adam Bede thought about Hetty; only he put his thoughts into different words.  If ever she behaved with cold vanity towards him, he said to himself it is only because she doesn’t love me well enough; and he was sure that her love, whenever she gave it, would be the most precious thing a man could possess on earth.  Before you despise Adam as deficient in penetration, pray ask yourself if you were ever predisposed to believe evil of any pretty woman—­if you ever could, without hard head-breaking demonstration, believe evil of the one supremely pretty woman who has bewitched you.  No:  people who love downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly against it.

Arthur Donnithorne, too, had the same sort of notion about Hetty, so far as he had thought of her nature of all.  He felt sure she was a dear, affectionate, good little thing.  The man who awakes the wondering tremulous passion of a young girl always thinks her affectionate; and if he chances to look forward to future years, probably imagines himself being virtuously tender to her, because the poor thing is so clingingly fond of him.  God made these dear women so—­and it is a convenient arrangement in case of sickness.