“The young man is blinded by his passion. Nature knows nothing of marriage, of companionship. She has only one aim. That accomplished, she is indifferent to the future of those she has joined together. I would have parents think only of their children’s happiness, giving to worldly considerations their true value, but nothing beyond, choosing for their children with loving care, with sense of their great responsibility.”
Which is it?
“I fear our young people would not be contented with our choosing,” I suggested.
“Are they so contented with their own, the honeymoon over?” she responded with a smile.
We agreed it was a difficult problem viewed from any point.
But I still think it would be better were we to heap less ridicule upon the institution. Matrimony cannot be “holy” and ridiculous at the same time. We have been familiar with it long enough to make up our minds in which light to regard it.
CHAPTER XIX
Man and his Tailor.
What’s wrong with the “Made-up Tie”? I gather from the fashionable novelist that no man can wear a made-up tie and be a gentleman. He may be a worthy man, clever, well-to-do, eligible from every other point of view; but She, the refined heroine, can never get over the fact that he wears a made-up tie. It causes a shudder down her high-bred spine whenever she thinks of it. There is nothing else to be said against him. There is nothing worse about him than this—he wears a made-up tie. It is all sufficient. No true woman could ever care for him, no really classy society ever open its doors to him.
I am worried about this thing because, to confess the horrid truth, I wear a made-up tie myself. On foggy afternoons I steal out of the house disguised. They ask me where I am going in a hat that comes down over my ears, and why I am wearing blue spectacles and a false beard, but I will not tell them. I creep along the wall till I find a common hosier’s shop, and then, in an assumed voice, I tell the man what it is I want. They come to fourpence halfpenny each; by taking the half-dozen I get them for a trifle less. They are put on in a moment, and, to my vulgar eye, look neat and tasteful.