In due course of time, he plans to return to the city, and to the theatres and parties he used to find so pleasant. All his friends are there. No, Miss Practical is not in the city; she is right here. Like a flash a revelation comes over him, and he paces the veranda angrily. Well, there’s only one thing to be done—he must tell her about it. Perhaps—and he sees a flash of blue through the shrubbery, which he seeks with the air of a man who has an object in view.
His circle of friends are very much surprised when he introduces Mrs. Ideal, for she is surely different from the ideal woman about whom they have heard so much. They naturally think he is inconsistent, but he isn’t, for some subtle alchemy has transfigured the homely little girl into the dearest, best, and altogether most beautiful woman Mr. Ideal has ever seen.
She is domestic in her tastes now, and has abandoned the professional nurse idea. She knows a great deal about Greek and Latin, and still more about Shakespeare and Browning and other authors.
But she neglects neither her books nor her housekeeping, and her husband spends his evenings at home, not because Mrs. Ideal would cry and make a fuss if he didn’t, but because his heart is in her keeping, and because his own fireside, with its sweet-faced guardian angel, is to him the most beautiful place on earth, and he has sense enough to appreciate what a noble wife is to him.
The plain truth is, when “any whatsoever” Mr. Ideal loves a woman, he immediately finds her perfect, and transfers to her the attributes which only exist in his imagination. His heart and happiness are there—not with the creatures of his dreams, but the warm, living, loving human being beside him, and to him, henceforth, the ideal is the real.
For “the ideal woman is as gentle as she is strong.” She wins her way among her friends and fellow human beings, even though they may be strangers, by doing many a kindness which the most of us are too apt to overlook or ignore.
No heights of thought or feeling are beyond her eager reach, and no human creature has sunk too low for her sympathy and her helping hand. Even the forlorn and friendless dog in the alley looks instinctively into her face for help.
She is in every man’s thoughts and always will be, as she always has been—the ideal who shall lead him step by step, and star by star, to the heights which he cannot reach alone.