‘And worst of all,’ said Wentworth, laughing, ‘we got married—’ ‘At the registrar’s office,’ said Rose, shrugging up her shoulders and making a face with a sad expression of horror, adding, after an interval: ‘And I don’t believe anyone knows it yet.’ ‘So much the better. What has the world got to do with our private affairs? What to us is the world or the world’s laws?’ ‘Upon my word, Wentworth, you are talking as improperly as ever.’ ‘Yes. I fear I’ve got that bad habit, and I don’t expect I shall ever get rid of it as long as I live. You and I can talk plainly. We need not try to humbug each other. It is little we have to trouble ourselves about Mrs. Grundy. The law has bound us together, but we are bound together by something stronger than the law, I hope.’ ‘Hope, Wentworth, is not the word. You know it,’ said Rose, as she lovingly looked into his somewhat grave and worn face. On board the steamer thus the newly-married couple talked. Marriages are of many kinds. For some we have to thank God, for others, alas! the devil. Referring to his marriage, William Hutton, the far-famed Birmingham historian, writes: ‘I never courted her, nor she me, yet we, by the close union with which we were cemented, were travelling towards the temple of Hymen without conversing upon the subject. Such is the happy effect of reciprocal love.’ This reciprocal love generally leads to matrimony, and thus it was Rose and Wentworth had married. A good deal is to be said against the institution. Matrimony is not always a bed of roses. If the roses are there, they are often furnished with an intolerable supply of thorns. There can be no doubt of the fact that in many cases matrimony has led to an immense amount of misery. It has kept in chains men and women who had been better apart. It has made for them life dull, blank, sunless, joyless, a thing only to terminate with death. It is hard that men and women thus ill-mated are not permitted to burst their fetters and be free. Take, for instance, the case of Mehetabel Wesley, the younger sister of the celebrated founder of Wesleyanism. Her heart was sensitive and full of love. We know what the mother of the Wesleys was—a stern, hard woman, whose first duty as a mother, according to her own statement, was to break the wills of her children. The father left his wife’s bed because, when he prayed for King William, she would not say amen. None of the girls seemed to have married happily, but this, the youngest and fairest of them all, had a Benjamin’s mess of misery. Her father compelled her to suffer the brutality of a marriage with a low wretch utterly unfit to be her lord and master. Was not her marriage an immorality? Was it not a shame that society should have compelled her to live with such a man?—so much so ‘that her only hope,’ as she told a friend, was death, ‘because we Methodists always die in transports of joy.’ But what do men and women know of each other, as a rule, before