The woman whom he finally received into his flinty bosom was a maiden of forty-five, who had known in her youth the uneasy joys of many flirtations, and who had marched through various successes (the triumphs of a small university town) to sit down at last in a life-long disappointment. Regretting her past, dissatisfied with every present, demanding improbabilities of the future, eager still to be flattered and worshipped and obeyed, she was wofully unfitted for marriage with an old man of plain habits and retired life, who was quite as egoistic as herself and far more combative and domineering. It was soon a horrible thing to remember the young lovers who had gone long ago, but who, it seemed to her, still adored her, and to compare them with this unsympathizing master, who gave her no courtship nor tender reverence, and who spoke but to demand submission.
“In a general way,” says a devout old lady of my acquaintance, “Divine Providence blesses second marriages.”
With no experience of my own in this line, and with not a large observation of the experience of others, I am nevertheless inclined to admit that my friend has the right of it. Conceding the fact that second marriages are usually happy, one naturally asks, Why is it? Is it because a man knows better how to select a second wife? or because he knows better how to treat her? Well disposed toward both these suppositions, I attach the most importance to the latter.
No doubt Benedict chooses more thoughtfully when he chooses a second time; no doubt he is governed more by judgment than in his first courtship, and less by blind impulse; no doubt he has learned some love-making wisdom from experience. A woman who will be patient with him, a woman who will care well for his household affairs and for his children, a woman who will run steadily rather than showily in the domestic harness,—that is what he usually wants when he goes sparking at forty or fifty.
But this is not all and not even the half of the explanation. He has acquired a knowledge of what woman is, and a knowledge of what may fairly be required of her. He has learned to put himself in her place; to grant her the sympathy which her sensitive heart needs; to estimate the sufferings which arise from her variable health; in short, he has learned to be thoughtful and patient and merciful. Moreover, he is apt to select some one who, like himself, has learned command of temper and moderation of expectation from the lessons of life. As he knows that a glorified wife is impossible here below, so she makes no strenuous demand for an angel husband.