We may now perceive how infinitely easier it is for ordinary people to meet and be companionable than for these rare and superior minds. Ordinary people, if bred in the same neighborhood and class, are sure to have a great fund of ideas in common, all those ideas that constitute the local common sense. If you listen attentively to their conversations you will find that they hardly ever go outside of that. They mention incidents and actions, and test them one after another by a tacit reference to the public opinion of the place. Therefore they have a good chance of agreeing, of considering each other reasonable; and this is why it is a generally received opinion that marriages between people of the same locality and the same class offer the greatest probability of happiness. So they do, in ordinary cases, but if there is the least touch of any original talent or genius in one of the parties, it is sure to result in many ideas that will be outside of any local common sense, and then the other party, living in that sense, will consider those ideas peculiar, and perhaps deplorable. Here, then, are elements of dissension lying quite ready like explosive materials, and the merest accident may shatter in a moment the whole fabric of affection. To prevent such an accident an artificial kind of intercourse is adopted which is not real companionship, or anything resembling it. The reader may imagine, and has probably observed in real life, a marriage in which the husband is a man of original power, able to think forcibly and profoundly, and the wife a gentle being quite unable to enter into any thought of that quality. In cases of that kind the husband may be affectionate and even tender, but he is careful to utter nothing beyond the safest commonplaces. In the presence of his wife he keeps his mind quite within the circle of custom. He has, indeed, no other resource. Custom and commonplace are the protection of the intelligent against misapprehension and disapproval. Marriages of this unequal kind are an imitation of those equal marriages in which both parties live in the local common sense; but there is this vast difference between them, that in the imitation the more intelligent of the two parties has to stifle half his nature. An intelligent man has to make up his mind in early life whether he has courage enough for such a sacrifice or not. Let him try the experiment of associating for a short time with people who cannot understand him, and if he likes the feeling of repression that results from it, if he is able to stop short always at the right moment, if he can put his knowledge on the shelf as one puts a book in a library, then perhaps he may safely undertake the long labor of companionship with an unsuitable wife.