The terrible results of this sudden start have strengthened me for ever in my solid judgment, which for the moment I was much inclined to slacken under the arch spell of St. Winifred. Listen deferentially to feminine opinion, but never let it go beyond your ears; until you have a good wife of your own. She will know how you look at things, and shape her wisdom to suit yours, and go beyond your own conviction in the certainty that you are right. And then she knows that she has done it all, whenever everything turns out well. But if, peradventure, it all goes amiss, she is the last one in the world to make it bad for you. It is your place then to take the blame on your own clumsy shoulders, and think scorn of outside results, while you have one true breast to comfort you. These thoughts were far beyond me yet; for a young man believes himself wondrous clever, and airs his conclusions about womankind, as a boy blows his bubble, or a child upon the grass his ball of dandelion-seed. And this was just the very thing Tom Erricker had always done; and I had thought it very fine, until I met my Dariel. But now I felt disgusted with him, and his Loo of £20,000 and all that snobbish frippery about his togs. However, I must make the best of that and him. To the life of my life I sent a line, as full of love as I could make it, with any room for common-sense behind. And then off I set for all that humbug, show, and sham, and breakfast-speeches, women up to date with tears, and men beyond it with champagne, lovely bride with lips too sweet for margarine to melt inside them, bridegroom in tepid waxwork form, and looking for courage to his mother, whose mind dwells over his weaning. All this was there, and a great deal more; and it seemed to me that my dear friend (who had lost his wit, and his wits as well) deserved our finest sympathies; though the girl was a harmless and good little thing, who wondered how her Tom could have thought so much of me. But if ever there were kind and warm people on the face of this cold-complexioned earth, these Yorkshire folk might fairly claim the warmest place among them. Not for hospitality alone (though in that they were beyond abundance) but also for solid good-will without sham, and a hearty power of liking any one who met them frankly. There was something about them altogether different from our Southern style; stronger and deeper, and more true in the way they stuck to what they said. Also I found them very eager to have large and liberal views of their own in abstract questions of politics; and if they made mistakes, it was--so far as I could follow suit--from contempt of shilly-shallying. I went among them, with the tags of my Tory armour tied, hooked with steel I ought to say; and though they could not pull any of it off, they made the whole suit more flexible, and airy, and elastic.