Many a girl has turned away a mechanic and married a rich loafer, only to find in good season that the mechanic was at heart a gentleman, with growing possibilities, and the loafer remained such for all time.
Advice is seldom heeded in such matters, but it may do to mention it. The true test of manhood is seen in the mettle of boyhood. If you wish to forecast the future, study the past history of your subject. If one is selfish, tyrannical, and overbearing by being rich, he will be a bad man to marry. If, on the other hand, he is pleasant, kind, genial, and forbearing, loves his kind, is attentive to his mother and sisters, and has made friends and character in early life, he is not very likely to change his notions later. There is often more manhood in a poor one-armed man than a rich athlete.
Don’t marry a man too poor. It is the height of folly to mate, and attempt to raise seven children on what will bring up three indifferently. Have a little discretion. Think that eating, dressing, etc., cost something, and no one can live happily without some of these common comforts. If they cannot buy them single, it is folly to double one’s misery by marrying in the jaws of starvation. It is suicide: it is worse,—it is double suicide, and may lead to pauperism and crime and disgrace.
Don’t marry where the woman is older than the man. Men are restless creatures and exacting. They expect grace, beauty, and refinement; they prefer youth to age, generally. At least it is the fashion to marry a wife some years younger than the husband. Women mature earlier; they have less expectancy of long life, and on an average live seven to ten years less, and show age at fifty more than a man does at sixty-five. Of the two, a woman should look smaller and younger and better than a man. This accords with the belief of all refined people.
Don’t marry a crank. This class of men will be wordy and persuasive. They tell all sorts of stories of life,—how the world is mismade; how they could improve upon this thing or that; how marriages should be made between blondes and brunettes; how, with their philosophy, society would reach perfection.
Such men are invariably tyrannical. They are exacting to the last degree; they have neither faith, hope, nor charity, but run in one groove. They distrust the powers that be, and generally mount some hobby, and forever prattle about the rights of free love or the wrongs of government. Avoid them as you would a tramp.
Don’t marry fine feathers. Chesterfield was well up on manners, and gave his son this rule, among his twenty-one maxims to marry by: “Let not the rustling of silk entrap you into matrimony.” Fine clothing has a certain fascination to many. Some choose a wife by the becoming effect of a tasty garment. Some select a fine dancer; others rely upon a small hand or a petite form. These points may be all well noted, but they are but parts of a greater whole that should govern a wise selection.
Don’t marry a “masher”—man or woman. A regular professional flirt will never settle down to love one woman or one man. Habits once formed will cling to them in after-life. They are like runaway teams—liable to take fright and go when least expected.
Civil attention, by a lady or gentleman, to the other sex is natural and courteous, but the thought that every fair lady is common prey is repulsive. The traveller who avoids all vacant car-seats but the nearest to a handsome young woman, and forces his conversation against her will, has an eye to his business of one more conquest; but the too often insulted woman who complains of over-attention from gentlemen is generally one who walks much unattended and shows some willingness to be not wholly unnoticed.