A loving wife is worth a multitude of friends.
Sweet are friends, and fame is sweet; but sweeter far a wifely heart whereon to lay a weary head. But
Each married pair must solve its own difficulties as best it can. If any advice were worth the offering, it would be this:
O ye Husbands, and O ye Wives, if not for your own sakes then for your children's, lead a straight, clean, honorable life; any other sort of life leads to despicability, to dismalness, to disaster.--Which only means, after all, that
In the marriage relation, as in every relation--the social, the industrial, the commercial, the political--it is conduct, it is character, that counts, nothing else;
Beauty--Wealth--Culture--Grace--Wit--Intellect--Sprightliness-- Vivacity--Humor--these are much but they are simply naught, and less than naught, when just this simple, single, yet insatiable thing called Man wants to live amicably, affectionately, martially, with that simple, single, but incomprehensible thing called Woman.
Character--Conduct--rule the world, the Matrimonial equally with the Municipal.
"The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it?" --Holy Writ
It does not take much to make two hearts beat faster than one.
The heart can deceive itself when it cannot deceive another.--Which will be cold comfort to some lovers, though it may console others.
To admit a sacred visitant into the inner recesses of the human heart, those recesses must be neat indeed. Remember, too, that you can
Never expect an angel to act as a charwoman; the sweeping must be done by the owner. Lastly,
Unless each heart is permitted access to the other, their union is fictitious, perhaps perilous.--Explain these tropes who can.
No man can tell to whom a woman's heart belongs; not even the man who calls the woman "his". And
Let no man imagine that when he has won him a woman, he has won him a woman's heart. Since,
Sometimes a woman will give her heart to one man and her troth to another. Besides,
Many a heart is hard to read--especially if it is a palimpsest. Indeed, many are illegible to their owners. Nevertheless, That the woman should not know her own heart (as so often happens) terrifies the woman as much as it exasperates the man. Yet,