The successful men of small beginnings are greatly liable to this curse of wifely hindrance. A barrister once briefless and now in silk--an artist once obscure and now famous--who in the days of impecuniosity and Bohemianism married the landlady's pretty daughter and towards the meridian of life find themselves in the front ranks of _la haute volée_ with a wife who drops her h's and multiplies her s's, know the full bitterness of the bread baked from that hasty brewing. Each woman may have been beautiful in her youth, and each man may have loved his own very passionately; but if she have nothing to supplement her beauty--if she have no brains to fall back on, by which she can be educated up to her husband's present social position as the wife of his successful maturity--she is a mistake. Dickens was quite right to kill off pretty childish Dora in 'David Copperfield.' If she had lived she would have been like Flora in 'Bleak House,' who indeed was Dora grown old but not matured; with all the grace and beauty of her youth gone, and nothing else to take their place. Men do not care for brains in excess in women. They like a sympathetic intellect which can follow and seize their thoughts as quickly as they are uttered; but they do not much care for any clear or specific knowledge of facts. Even the most philosophic among them would rather not be set right in a classical quotation, an astronomical calculation, or the exact bearing of a political question by a lovely being in tarlatane whom he was graciously unbending to instruct. Neither do they want anything very strong-minded. To most men, indeed, the feminine strong-mindedness that can discuss immoral problems without blushing is a quality as unwomanly as a well-developed biceps or a 'shoulder-of-mutton' fist. It is sympathy, not antagonism--it is companionship, not rivalry, still less supremacy, that they like in women; and some women with brains as well as learning--for the two are not the same thing--understand this, and keep their blue stockings well covered by their petticoats. Others, enthusiasts for freedom of thought and intellectual rights, show theirs defiantly; and meet with their reward. Men shrink from them. Even clever men, able to meet them on their own ground, do not feel drawn to them; while all but high-class minds are humiliated by their learning and dwarfed by their moral courage. And no man likes to feel humiliated or dwarfed in the presence of a woman, and because of her superiority.