All too late, Gerda,—
Too late to play in the lane!
The Good Wife: A Norwegian Story.
Part I.—Nothing Lost By Good Humor
For more than a month I had been ransacking my memory in search of some story or narrative to offer our readers, but with rather poor success. I thought of all the good things I had ever heard, and tumbled and tossed my books in vain—nothing could I find that was suitable for either children or parents. So I was, very reluctantly, about to abandon the enterprise, when it chanced that, being unable to compose myself to sleep, a few nights since, I took up, according to my custom on such occasions, an old copy of Montaigne, the usual companion of my vigils, the fellow-occupant of my pillow, and the only moralist whose musings one can read with pleasure on the wrong side of forty.
I opened the Essays carelessly, for each and every page of them is precious and replete with themes for meditation. In so doing, I alighted upon the chapter entitled, 'Of three Good Women,'—which commences thus: 'They are not to be found by the dozen, as every one knows, and especially not in the duties of married life, for that is a market full of such thorny circumstances that it is no easy matter for a woman's will to keep whole and sound in it for any length of time.'
'Montaigne is an impertinent fellow!' I exclaimed, slamming to the book. 'What? this close reader of antiquity, this fine analyst of the human heart, has been able to find only three good women, only three devoted wives, in all the Greek and Roman annals! This is playing the joker out of season. Goodness is the special attribute of woman. Every married woman is good, or supposed to be such. I bethink me, too, that our old jurists always make the law presume this goodness to exist, at the outset,'