The young people of the two lonely lighthouse islands, who made love to each other through telescopes, are good examples of the way in which instinct simulates the impulse which calls itself love when there are two or three instead of one to look at. For we may be quite sure that had the lighthouse island youth been John instead of James, fair instead of dark, garrulous instead of reticent, short and fat instead of tall and slender, the lighthouse island girl would have loved him all the same, and would have quite believed that this man was the only man she ever could have loved, and that her instinctive gravitation was her free choice. The French system of marriage, then, based on this accommodating instinct, works well for women who are not strongly individual, not inconstant by temperament, and not given to sentimentality. But, seeing that all women are not merely negative, and that passions and affections do sometimes assert themselves inconveniently, the system has had the effect of making society lenient to the little follies of married women, unless too strongly pronounced--partly because the human heart insists on a certain amount of free-will, which fact must be recognized--but partly, we must remember, because of the want of the young-lady element in society. In England, where our girls are let loose early, we have free-trade in flirting; consequently, we think that all that sort of thing ought to be done before marriage, and that, when once a woman has made her choice and put her neck under the yoke, she ought to stick to her bargain and loyally fulfil her self-imposed engagement. One consequence of this free-trade in flirting and this large amount of personal liberty is that love-marriages are more frequent with us than with the French, with whom indeed, in the higher classes, they are next to impossible; and, unfortunately, the corollary to this is that love-marriages are too often _mésalliances_. There is of course no question, ethically, between virtuous vulgarity and refined vice. A groom who smells of the stable and speaks broad Somersetshire or racier Cumberland, but who is brave, faithful, honest, incapable of a lie or of meanness in any form, is a better man than the best-bred gentleman whose life is as vicious as his bearing is unexceptionable. The most undeniable taste in dress, and the most correct pronunciation, would scarcely reconcile us to cruelty, falsehood, or cowardice; and yet we do not know a father who would prefer to give his girl to the groom, rather than the gentleman, and who would think horny-handed virtue, dressed in fustian and smelling of the stable, the fitter husband of the two.