(39.) Two persons had all their lives been very intimate with one another; their incomes were in common, they lived together, and were never out of one anotherʼs sight. After fourscore years they thought it was time to part and put an end to their intimacy; they had then but one day to live, and dared not attempt to pass it together: they hastened to break before death, as their complacency would hold out no longer. They would have been good models had they not lived so long, for had they died one moment sooner, they still would have been good friends and have left behind them a rare example of perseverance in friendship.[221] (40.) Families are often disturbed by mistrust, jealousy, and antipathy, while outwardly they seem happy, peaceable, and cheerful, and we suppose they enjoy a tranquillity which does not exist; there are very few who can bear investigation. The visit you pay only interrupts a domestic quarrel which awaits but your departure to break out afresh. (41.) In all societies common-sense always gives way first. The most sensible people often are swayed by a most foolish and eccentric personage; they study his weakness, his temper, his fancies, and put up with them; they avoid thwarting him, and everybody gives him his way; when his countenance betrays he is cheerful, he is commended; they are grateful to him for not being always insufferable; he is feared, considered, obeyed, and sometimes beloved. (42.) None but those persons who have had aged relatives, or those who have them still, and whose heirs they may become, can tell what they had, or have now, to endure. (43.) Cleantes[222] is a very worthy man; he has taken unto himself a wife, who is the best and most sensible person in the world; both, in their ways, are the life and soul of the company they keep; a more straightforward and more polite behaviour than theirs is nowhere to be met with. They are to part to-morrow, and the deed of separation is already drawn up at the lawyerʼs. Surely they must possess certain merits which do not harmonise together and certain virtues which are incompatible. (44.) A man may be sure of the dowry, the jointure, and his marriage settlements, but scarcely of the contract the parents have entered upon to board and lodge the young couple for a certain time;[223] for that depends on the frail harmony between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law, which often ends the first year of the marriage. (45.) A father-in-law loves both his son and daughter-in-law, a mother-in-law her son and not her daughter-in-law; the latter pays her back in her own coin. (46.) What a step-mother loves the least in the wide world are her husbandʼs children; the fonder she is of her husband the worse step-mother she shows herself. Step-mothers make of towns and villages complete deserts, and stock the country with more beggars, vagrants, servants, and slaves, than poverty does.