But Roman proverbs and Roman philosophy are unworthy and delusive. There _is_ a straight stick in the wood if you will be satisfied with it when found; there _is_ a four-leaved shamrock amongst the herbage if you will only seek for it honestly on your knees. Should there be but one in a hundred women, nay, one in a thousand, on whom an honest heart is not thrown away, it is worth while to try and find her. At worst, better be deceived over and over again than sink into that deepest slough of depravity in which those struggle who, because their own trust has been outraged, declare there is no faith to be kept with others; because their own day has been darkened, deny the existence of light. “You speak feelingly,” I observe, conscious that such unusual earnestness denotes a conviction he will get the worst of the debate. “You have perhaps been more fortunate than the rest. Have _you_ found her, then, this hundredth woman, this prize, this pearl, this black swan, glorious as the phœnix and rare as the dodo? Forgive my _argumentum ad hominem_, if I may use the expression, and forgive my urging that such good fortune only furnishes one of those exceptions which, illogical people assert, prove the rule.” There is a vibration of his teeth wanting only lips to become a sneer, while he replies— “In my own case I was _not_ so lucky, but I kept my heart up and went on with my search to the end.” “Exactly,” I retort in triumph; “you, too, spent a lifetime looking for the four-leaved shamrock, and never found it after all. But I think women are far more unreasonable than ourselves in this desire for the unattainable, this disappointment when illusion fades into reality. Not only in their husbands do they expect perfection, and that, too, in defiance of daily experience, of obvious incompetency, but in their servants, their tradespeople, their carriages, their horses, their rooms, their houses, the dinners they eat, and the dresses they wear. With them an avowal of incapacity to reconcile impossibilities stands for wilful obstinacy, or sheer stupidity at best. They believe themselves the victims of peculiar ill-fortune if their coachman gets drunk, or their horses go lame; if milliners are careless or ribbons unbecoming; if chimneys smoke, parties fall through, or it rains when they want to put on a new bonnet. They never seem to understand that every ‘if’ has its ‘but,’ every _pro_ its _con_. My old friend, Mr. Bishop, of Bond Street, the Democritus of his day (and may he live as long!), observed to me many years ago, when young people went mad about the polka, that the new measure was a type of everything else in life, ‘What you gain in dancing you lose in turning round.’ Is it not so with all our efforts, all our undertakings, all our noblest endeavours after triumph and success? In dynamics we must be content to resign the _maximum_ of one property that we may preserve the indispensable _minimum_ of another, must allow for friction in velocity, must