years creep on, beauty simply gets more highly coloured.  And then, “beauty is only skin-deep.”  Fantastically wrong!  Some of it is not that; and, for the rest, is a woman like a toy balloon?—­just a surface?  To hear that proverb from a man is to know him at once for a phonographic kind of fool.  The fundamental and enduring grace of womanhood goes down to the skeleton; you cannot have a pretty face without a pretty skull, just as you cannot have one without a good temper.

Yet all the same there is an excellent reason why one should shun beauty in a prospective wife, at anyrate obvious beauty—­the kind of beauty people talk about, and which gets into the photographers’ windows.  The common beautiful woman has a style of her own, a favourite aspect.  After all, she cannot be perfect.  She comes upon you, dazzles you, marries you; there is a time of ecstasy.  People envy you, continue to envy you.  After a time you envy yourself—­yourself of the day before yesterday.  For the imperfection, the inevitable imperfection—­in one case I remember it was a smile—­becomes visible to you, becomes your especial privilege.  That is the real reason.  No beauty is a beauty to her husband.  But with the plain woman—­the thoroughly plain woman—­it is different.  At first—­I will not mince matters—­her ugliness is an impenetrable repulse.  Face it.  After a time little things begin to appear through the violent discords:  little scraps of melody—­a shy tenderness in her smile that peeps out at you and vanishes, a something that is winning, looking out of her eyes.  You find a waviness of her hair that you never saw at the beginning, a certain surprising, pleasing, enduring want of clumsiness in part of her ear.  And it is yours.  You can see she strikes the beholder with something of a shock; and while the beauty of the beauty is common for all the world to rejoice in, you will find in your dear, plain wife beauty enough and to spare; exquisite—­for it is all your own, your treasure-trove, your safely-hidden treasure....

Then, in the matter of age; though young fellows do not imagine it, it is very easy to marry a wife too young.  Marriage has been defined as a foolish bargain in which one man provides for another man’s daughter, but there is no reason why this should go so far as completing her education.  If your conception of happiness is having something pretty and innocent and troublesome about you, something that you can cherish and make happy, a pet rabbit is in every way preferable.  At the worst that will nibble your boots.  I have known several cases of the girl-wife, and it always began like an idyll, charmingly; the tenderest care on one hand, winsome worship on the other—­until some little thing, a cut chin or a missing paper, startled the pure and natural man out of his veneer, dancing and blaspheming, with the most amazing consequences.  Only a proven saint should marry a girl-wife, and his motives might be misunderstood.  The idyllic wife