And then the temper and manner of people when making love are so different from what these become afterwards! "One would think the whole endeavour of both parties during the time of courtship is to hinder themselves from being known--to disguise their natural temper and real desires in hypocritical imitation, studied compliance, and continued affectation. From the time that their love is avowed, neither sees the other but in a mask; and the cheat is often managed on both sides with so much art, and discovered afterwards with so much abruptness, that each has reason to suspect that some transformation has happened on the wedding-night, and that by a strange imposture, as in the case of Jacob, one has been courted and another married." Our conventional state of society curtails the limits of choice in matrimony and hinders the natural law of the marriage of the fittest. We knew a young gentleman living in a London suburb who bore an excellent character, had sufficient income, and was in every respect marriageable. He wished to try the experiment of two against the world, but--as he told the clergyman of his parish--he was in the city all day, and never had an opportunity of becoming acquainted with a young lady whom he could ask to be his wife. We have heard of the stiff Englishman who would not attempt to save a fellow-creature from drowning because he had never been introduced to him. In the same way unmarried ladies are allowed to remain in the Slough of Despond because the valiant young gentlemen who would rescue them, though they may be almost, are not altogether in their social set. Every one knows Plato's theory about marriage. He taught that men and women were hemispheres, so to speak, of an original sphere; that ill-assorted marriages were the result of the wrong hemispheres getting together; that, if the true halves met, the man became complete, and the consequence was the "happy-ever-after" of childhood's stories. There is much truth in this doctrine, that for every man there is _one_ woman somewhere in the world, and for every woman _one_ man. They seldom meet in time. If they did, what would become of the sensational novelists? But are there not in reality too many artificial obstacles to happy marriages? Why do the right men and women so seldom meet? Because mammon, ambition, envy, hatred, and all uncharitableness step between and keep apart those whom God would join together.