This act of envelopment, performed in the marriage ceremony, is infinitely symbolic, allegorical, susceptible of amplification to any sentimental or moral tune that you please. It is the commonplace of the “few well-chosen words” to which married couples have to submit from the steps of the altar. The symbol and the allegory, the moral and the sentiment, are, however, less interesting than the actual degree of reality which attends and follows the act. The grace or otherwise which a wife imparts to the folds of the mantle around her is one of the tests of proficiency in the married profession. It is a test out of which the English wife comes very well; much better for instance than the German, who accepts the covering with thankfulness and humility, poking out a meek head now and then but otherwise only amplifying, as the years go on, the circumference of the garment; whereas the American assimilates the whole garment to herself with any amount of dash, leaving it to her partner to supply the motive power and fill the pockets, while taking up as little room as he conveniently can,—and the American man’s capacity for social compression is as striking as his capacity for commercial expansion. The Englishwoman wears her mantle neither selfishly nor cringingly: she appropriates her part of it with a natural dignity which so incorporates it with herself that the imagination almost fails to grasp the fact of her ever having been without it. She is by no means indifferent to the fall of its folds round her own figure, taking a good deal of pride and trouble in the arrangement of them, but her self-consciousness in this respect does not make her forgetful of the figure cut by her partner. She insists that the elegance of his posture, which she would be the first to exaggerate, shall be unimpaired by any extravagance on her part which might strain the buttons or mar the flowing lines of the side which he presents to the world. It is rather a heavy mantle that the Englishman throws, a solid article in tweed or homespun, not lightly to be shifted and apt to be impervious to gentle breezes as well as to more blustering elements: but if the Englishwoman inevitably feels at times a trifle overpowered and would gratefully welcome the respite of a button or two, she is not given to any awkward wriggles of betrayal or to moppings of the brow in public. In private the owner of the mantle may have, for his good, to be aware of sharp elbows, and even to submit in domestic seclusion to the terrifying total emergence from the common garment of an overheated partner; but, after this salutary breathing space, he usually finds no reluctance on her part to re-assume and rearrange the folds. He can, in fact, rely upon his wife to minimise any possible appearance of misfit, since an Englishwoman resents above all any diminution of the common dignity, by which she means her husband’s dignity more than her own.