THE ENGLISH WIFE When I dine out and look around me, or when I am present at any other social function at which men and their wives appear in unmistakeable couples, the infinite variety of married people affects me strongly. There they all are, Mrs Anderson who simply exists to provide a stout and comfortable background for her picturesque husband, fragile Mrs Conkling whose pathetic anxiety to bring out her angular husband’s laboured wit would be tiresome if it were not so genuinely maternal, Lady Manville of the truly refined apprehensions who puts up so complacently with an irritable snob, Mrs Fitzmaurice who pants to live up, and Mrs Dobbs who does not trouble to live down, to the man whose name she carries, Mrs Cantelupe who mentally embraces the doctor, and Mrs Martingale who openly snubs the Major, and many more of them, all with nothing in common but that they are English wives. One might imagine the existence of some subtle common bond that would unite the persons who had gone in for so definite a profession—at least for a woman—as matrimony. Yet it does not seem obvious even to the most acute perception. If it were more obvious the question would not so often insolubly put itself how such and such persons ever come to marry at all. True, there are many married people who have to so successful a measure assimilated one another that it is an impossible effort to imagine them otherwise than married, yet in their case a more subtle form of the question is often suggested, as to the spirit and the emotion with which they first determined to unite their destinies. Further investigations into the subconscious may in time reveal the deep mysteries of affinity, real or imagined, but at present a dark curtain hangs over them. It cannot be mere luck that makes an English wife. The Englishman has a national, as well as an individual, quality. His chief consoler and supporter, therefore, is likely to have some national quality too, whether it dimly exists from the beginning in a maidenly consciousness, or whether it grows in the married state as a natural result of the contiguity. A Frenchman, or a French woman, who had as sure a touch as the author of “Les Silences du Colonel Bramble,” might throw some light on the nature of this essential quality, but for an Englishman the task is too difficult to be formally attempted. The best he could contribute would be sidelights and reflections.