It is said in England that, of all men who occupy high positions in professional life, judges are those who oftenest marry below their station.

Many are even said to have married impossible women, and on these women many amusing stories are related in the smoke-rooms of London clubs—stories which, I have no doubt, are of the se non È vero, È ben trovato type, and as faithful to truth as the stories that are told on the feet of the Chicago women or the intellect of the Boston girls.

CHORUS-GIRL MARRIAGES

However, it must be admitted that fools are not the only men who marry women that are greatly inferior to them in manner, education, and social standing; the cleverest men and the most aristocratic ones have often been known to do the same.

Dukes, marquises, and earls have married chorus-girls and shop-girls; great literary men and artists have married uneducated girls, and have led very happy lives with them. Of course, I pass over the aristocracy who marry among the common people in order to get their coats of arms out of pawn. If they are poor and marry rich girls, you can hardly call this a case of mÉsalliance, since the superiority of birth in the man is compensated by the superiority of fortune in the woman.

Of course, mÉsalliances appeal to people, because they always suggest marriages for love, and novelists of all countries have worked this theme for all it is worth. In real life they very seldom work well, for the simple reason that matrimony places a man and a woman on absolutely equal footing, and that happiness for them, in the case of a mÉsalliance, is only possible on condition that one goes up to the level of the superior, or the other comes down to the level of the inferior.

EDUCATING ONE'S WIFE

Marriages that have the greatest chances of success are those in which the two partners bring the same amount of capital in social position, in education, in fortune, in character, and I will even add in stature and in physical beauty, with perhaps a slight—a very slight—superiority to the credit of the man in all these conditions, except that of beauty, which is an attribute that woman can possess in any degree without making the happiness of her husband and herself run any risk.

Mrs. Hodgson Burnett, in one of her novels, makes a barrister fall in love with a girl who works in the coal-mines of Lancaster (another case of the legal profession going wrong). The man has the girl sent to school to learn manners and get educated, then marries her, and all is smooth ever after.

I have heard of this being done in real life with less success. The behaviour of the man in a case like this should create gratitude in the heart of the woman, and gratitude does not engender love. On the contrary, Cupid is a little fellow so fond of his liberty and so wilful that anything that tends to influence him—worse than that, to force him—has on him the contrary effect to that which should be expected.

Yet, I say, it is the only way to bring an uneducated woman to the level of an educated man—before matrimony. After marriage the woman is acknowledged, proclaimed the equal of her husband, and she will stand no hint as to her being inferior to her husband in any way.

If she loves him and is not conceited, any act on his part, however kindly performed, that would suggest to her that she might improve herself in language, behaviour, etc., would cause her unhappiness and even pangs of anguish.

If, on the other hand, she did not love him and was conceited, or even only of an independent character, she would soon give him a piece of her mind on the subject of her improvements, and let him hear the great typical phrase of democracy, 'I'm as good as you.'

DANGEROUS EXPERIMENTS

No, no; he must put up with the situation, and make the best of it. In that case men console themselves with the thought that their wives are pretty, or that they are good housekeepers, good cooks. After all, a man gets married to please himself, not for what the world has to say of his wife.

Still, you have to succeed in the world, and if you despise the opinion of the world the world turns its back on you. And you must remember this: however big you are, or you think you are, the earth can go on running its course round the sun without your help.

French and American women have a keen power of observation and native adaptability. Better than any other women in the world, they can soon adapt themselves to new surroundings and new ways, and learn how to talk, walk, dress, and behave like the leading women of any new social circles they may have entered. Witness the American women that are to be seen at the courts of Europe.

However, the experiment of a mÉsalliance is always a dangerous one to make. Nine times out of ten the rabbit will always taste of the cabbage it was brought up on.