When a man has married a doll wife he has assigned himself to absolute loneliness or a double burden. He cannot live with his pretty toy in any more reality of sympathy than does a child with her puppet. He can tell her nothing of his affairs, nothing of his troubles nor of his thoughts, because she can impart no new idea, even from the woman's point of view, not from want of heart but from want of brains to understand another's life. Is she not a doll? and does not the very essence of her dollhood lie in this want of perceptive faculty both for things and feelings? What are the hot flushes of passion, the bitter tears of grief, the frenzy of despair, to her? She sees them; and she wonders that people can be so silly as to make themselves and her so uncomfortable; but of the depth of the anguish they express she knows no more than does her waxen prototype when little missy sobs over it in her arms and confides her sorrows to its deaf ears. Whatever anxieties oppress her husband, he must keep them to himself, he cannot share them with her; and the last shred of his credit, like the last effort of his strength, must be employed in maintaining his toy wife in the fool's paradise where alone she can make her habitation. Many a man's back has broken under the strain of such a burden; and many a ruined fortune might have been held together and repaired when damaged, had it not been for the exigencies and necessities of the living doll, who had to be spared all want or inconvenience at the cost of everything else. How many men are groaning in spirit at this moment over the infatuation that made them sacrifice the whole worth of life for the sake of a pretty face and a plastic manner! The doll woman is as helpless practically as she is useless morally. If she is in personal danger, she either faints or becomes dazed, according to her physiological conditions. Sometimes she is hysterical and frantic, and then she is actively troublesome. In general, however, she is just so much dead weight on hand, to be thought for as well as protected; a living corpse to be carried on the shoulders of those who are struggling for their own lives. She can foresee no possibilities, measure no distances, think of no means of escape. Never quick nor ready, pressure paralyzes such wits as she possesses; and it is not from selfishness so much as from pure incapacity to help herself or to serve others that the poor doll falls down in a helpless heap of self-surrender, and lets her very children perish before her eyes without making an effort to protect them.