Do you think they can manage thus to summarise their several points and merits, during the pauses of the Trois Temps, or while nailing “a rover” at croquet, or, mayhap, when promenading at the Botanical?
I doubt it much.
Professor Owen, it is said, will, if you submit to his notice a couple of inches of the bone of any bird, beast, fish, or reptile, at once describe to you the characteristics of the animal to which it belonged; its habits, and everything connected with it; besides telling you when and where it lived and died, and whether it existed at the pre-Adamite period or not—and that, too, without your giving him the least previous information touching the osseous substance about which you asked his opinion.
But, granting that the most gigantic theory might be built up on some slighter practical evidence, I would defy anyone—even that philosophising German who evolved a camel from the depths of his inner moral consciousness—to determine the capabilities of any young lady for the future onerous duties of wife and mother, and mistress of a household, merely from hearing her say what coloured ice she would have after the heated dance; or, from her statements that the evening was “flat” or “nice,” the season “dull” or “busy,” and the heroine of the last new novel “delightful,” while the villain was correspondingly “odious.”
He couldn’t do it.
The commonplace conversation of every-day society is no criterion for character.
With Jemima, the maid-of-all-work, and Bob, the baker’s assistant, her “young man,” it is quite a different thing. They have no trammels placed in the way of their free association; and, I would venture to assert, know more of one another in one month of company-keeping than Augustus and Laura will achieve in the course of any number of seasons of fashionable intercourse. A “Sunday out” beats a croquet party hollow, in its opportunities for intimacy—as may readily be believed.
It is, really, curious this ignorance common in middle-class husbands and wives, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, respecting their several attributes and characteristics before they became connected by marriage, and time makes them better acquainted—very curious, indeed!
An American essayist, writing on this point, says—“When your mother came and told her mother that she was engaged, and your grandmother told your grandfather, how much did they know of the intimate nature of the young gentleman to whom she had pledged her existence? I will not be so hard as to ask how much your respected mamma knew at that time of the intimate nature of your respected papa, though, if we should compare a young girl’s man-as-she-thinks-him with a forty-summered matron’s man-as-she-finds-him, I have my doubts as to whether the second would be a fac-simile of the first.” And yet, young men and women of respectable standing “over the way,” are allowed far greater latitude for intercommunication than our own; so much so, that I must say, I would not like our budding misses to go the lengths of the American girl, who receives her own company when she pleases, without any previous permission, and can go abroad to places of public amusement, or, indeed, anywhere she likes, without a chaperon.
Still, there is a medium in all things; and, without verging to the extreme of our Transatlantic cousins, our conventionalities might be so tempered by the introduction of a little genuine human nature, as to admit of a trifling freer intercourse between our youth and young maidenhood of the upper classes.