But these things will happen, and equally of course all girls should marry, a happy marriage being the best fate for any woman, no matter how cultivated, how talented she may be. I have no doubts whatever on that subject. Suppose she writes; who so fit to battle with the publisher as the husband? or she paints; well, he can smile on the critics and undermine them with a good cigar and all the rest of it. Or does she sing? Surely, surely the husband’s protection comes in there more than ever; while for those lucky women who only want to fulfil their destiny and make a home, the husband of course takes his right position at once, and is guardian, bread-winner, and head in a way that Nature intended him to be, and that all real women want him to be. The few who clamour for another arrangement don’t understand the subject at all, and are as ridiculous as they are abnormal and few in number, and therefore need not be considered in the least. There is, therefore, no doubt that women should marry if they can; and if not, well, there is plenty for them to do, although they will never be as happy--I am sure of that--as the happily married woman; neither will they ever suffer as an unhappily married woman must, albeit very many unhappy marriages would have been far otherwise had people had common sense at first and married each other as what they were, and not what they supposed each other to be; resenting their own mistakes on the unfortunate object they had deified, and not on their own stupid selves, while of course they should be resolved to make the best of what was inevitable, and to really make the wife or husband become all they had imagined him or her to be.