WANDA.
A man cast forth from his home is like a ship cut loose from its anchor and rudderless. Whatever may have been his weakness, his offences, they cannot absolve you from your duty to watch over your husband's soul, to be his first and most faithful friend, to stand between him and his temptations and perils. That is the nobler side of marriage. When the light of love is faded, and its joys are over, its duties and its mercies remain. Because one of the twain has failed in these the other is not acquitted of obligation.
"Choose some career; make yourself some aim in life; do not fold your talents in a napkin; in a napkin that lies on the supper-table at Bignon's. That idle, aimless life is very attractive, I daresay, in its way, but it must grow wearisome and unsatisfactory as years roll on. The men of my house have never been content with it; they have always been soldiers, statesmen, something or other beside mere nobles."
"But they have had a great position."
"Men make their own position; they cannot make a name (at least, not to my thinking). You have that good fortune; you have a great name; you only need, pardon me, to make your manner of life worthy of it."
"Cannot make a name? Surely in these days the beggar rides on horseback in all the ministries and half the nobilities;"
"You mean that Hans, Pierre, or Richard becomes a count, an excellency, or an earl? What does that change? It alters the handle; it does not alter the saucepan. No one can be ennobled. Blood is blood; nobility can only be inherited; it cannot be conferred by all the heralds in the world. The very meaning and essence of nobility are descent, inherited traditions, instincts, habits, and memories—all that is meant by noblesse oblige."