A young girl brought up at home by her mother or by her virtuous,
bigoted, amiable or cross-grained old aunt; a young girl, whose steps
have never crossed the home threshold without being surrounded by
chaperons, whose laborious childhood has been wearied by tasks, albeit
they were profitless, to whom in short everything is a mystery, even
the Seraphin puppet show, is one of those treasures which are met
with, here and there in the world, like woodland flowers surrounded by
brambles so thick that mortal eye cannot discern them. The man who
owns a flower so sweet and pure as this, and leaves it to be
cultivated by others, deserves his unhappiness a thousand times over.
He is either a monster or a fool.
And if in the preceding Meditation we have succeeded in proving to you
that by far the greater number of men live in the most absolute
indifference to their personal honor, in the matter of marriage, is it
reasonable to believe that any considerable number of them are
sufficiently rich, sufficiently intellectual, sufficiently penetrating
to waste, like Burchell in the _Vicar of Wakefield_, one or two years
in studying and watching the girls whom they mean to make their wives,
when they pay so little attention to them after conjugal possession
during that period of time which the English call the honeymoon, and
whose influence we shall shortly discuss?
Since, however, we have spent some time in reflecting upon this
important matter, we would observe that there are many methods of
choosing more or less successfully, even though the choice be promptly
made.
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