'I think not. Barmaids are young women who, by the exacting demands of their calling, are bound to be healthy, active, intelligent and shrewd. Consider how such a woman would be thrown away in the ridiculous and empty existence led by our wives! How she would laugh at the shallow interests of the women around her, and despise her do-nothing husband! Without counting that she might be demoralised by her new position, and add the mistakes of a parvenue to the foibles of the class into which she was admitted!' 'Then, on the whole, you will----' 'Remain single, or take for wife the usual fool of my own class, who will have the usual fool of her own class for a husband.' 'But, Edgar,' said I, after a short pause, 'I am not so calm as you are, and my mind is less well-regulated than yours. I want something in my wife that you would not want from yours. The docile acceptance of my love would never content me; I want it returned.' But this view of the case had the effect of irritating Edgar, who naturally resented the idea of any other nature having deeper needs than his own. 'It is unreasonable to expect, from our physical and mental inferior, powers equal to our own,' he said, in a tone of dismissal of the subject. 'Then how am I to expect from Helen the power of looking at my disfigured face without horror, when I am by no means sure that I could have felt redoubled devotion if a similar accident had happened to her?' 'Women are different from us, and not to be judged by the same rules. Beauty--of some sort--is a duty with them, while every one knows that an ugly man makes quicker progress with them than a handsome one.' 'Well, I should like to judge what sort of progress with them my ugliness is likely to make. Give me a looking-glass.' But he would not. He said the doctor had forbidden me to use my eyes yet, that my face was still unhealed, and the bandages must not be moved. And finally he declined to talk to me any longer, and told me to go to sleep.