Immediately upon having the engagement ratified, the accepted suitor gives the lady an engagement ring. This should be as handsome a present as he can afford to buy. Together with all other presents and correspondence on both sides, this ring must be returned if the engagement should be broken off.
[Sidenote: One’s duty to one’s betrothed.]
The accepted man is in duty bound to spend most of his leisure with his intended bride. He must not go off for a sojourn abroad while she is spending some weeks by the sea in England, unless she has expressed a wish to that effect. It would be a considerable “snub” to her to do so.
Society has sometimes been amused by the announcement one day of a “marriage having been arranged between Mr. A. and Miss B.,” and on the next of the intention of Mr. A. to start for a tour round the world. This almost always means that the man has been entrapped into a proposal, and would willingly retreat if he honourably could. Such things happen only too often. Manœuvring mothers have much to answer for in the matter. Worldly girls have often sufficient wisdom of the serpent to bring a reluctant wooer to the point and, by immediately announcing the engagement to their friends, to make it extremely difficult for him to retreat.
Sometimes a girl falls so wildly in love with a man that she creates a kind of corresponding, though passing, fervour in him, and while it lasts he believes himself in love, though his emotions are only a mixture of gratified vanity and that physical attraction which needs true love to redeem it from the fleshly sort.
[Sidenote: When a girl takes the initiative.]
Should marriage follow upon such courtships as these, where the girl takes ever the initiative, the union is very seldom a happy one. The wife never feels sure that her husband really loves her or would have chosen her. She knows that he was her choice, rather than she his, and a racking jealousy seizes her and makes her not only miserable herself, but a very uncomfortable companion for him.
He, too, often finds when it is too late that she fulfils none of his ideals, and is in many ways a contrast to the girl he would have chosen if she had not whirled him into the vortex of her own strong feeling. And he occasionally wonders if she may not some day experience a similar strength of attraction for some other man and let herself be carried away by it as she had been by her feeling for him. “Hot fires soon burn out,” he thinks, and remembers the warning given to Othello: “She hath deceived her father, and may thee.”