"She is so young."
"Your wife?"
"She is so—" the bland Italian appeared to check some disparaging adjective, and mildly added, "so good, I allow; but you must own that she and I cannot have much in common."
"I own nothing of the sort. You have your house and your interests, your happiness and your lives, in common. We men are so exacting, we expect to find ideal nymphs and goddesses when we condescend to marry a mortal; and if we did, our chickens would be boiled to rags, and our mutton come up as cold as a stone."
"Per Bacco, you are an oracle," said Riccabocca, laughing. "But I am not so sceptical as you are. I honour the fair sex too much. There are a great many women who realize the ideal of men, to be found in—the poets!"
"There's my dear Mrs. Dale," resumed the parson, not heeding the sarcastic compliment to the sex, but sinking his voice into a whisper, and looking round cautiously,—"there's my dear Mrs. Dale, the best woman in the world,—an angel I would say, if the word were not profane; BUT—"
"What's the BUT?" asked the doctor, demurely.
"BUT I too might say that 'she and I have not much in common,' if I were only to compare mind to mind, and when my poor Carry says something less profound than Madame de Stael might have said, smile on her in contempt from the elevation of logic and Latin. Yet when I remember all the little sorrows and joys that we have shared together, and feel how solitary I should have been without her—oh, then, I am instantly aware that there is between us in common something infinitely closer and better than if the same course of study had given us the same equality of ideas; and I was forced to brace myself for a combat of intellect, as I am when I fall in with a tiresome sage like yourself. I don't pretend to say that Mrs. Riccabocca is a Mrs. Dale," added the parson, with lofty candour,—"there is but one Mrs. Dale in the world; but still, you have drawn a prize in the wheel matrimonial! Think of Socrates, and yet he was content even with his—Xantippe!"
Dr. Riccabocca called to mind Mrs. Dale's "little tempers," and inly rejoiced that no second Mrs. Dale had existed to fall to his own lot. His placid Jemima gained by the contrast. Nevertheless he had the ill grace to reply, "Socrates was a man beyond all imitation!—Yet I believe that even he spent very few of his evenings at home. But /revenons a nos moutons/, we are nearly at Mrs. Fairfield's cottage, and you have not yet told me what you have settled as to Leonard."
The parson halted, took Riccabocca by the button, and informed him, in very few words, that Leonard was to go to Lansmere to see some relations there, who had the fortune, if they had the will, to give full career to his abilities.