The English wife does not exact a punctilious politeness from her husband, which is only an instance of the general difficulty that English people experience in associating polished manners with familiarity. Politeness for them is a mark of distance, and its use in any degree of social proximity has the air of hoisting a telescope to see one’s friends across a table: it is a source, even, of suspicion, and there are few of us sufficiently enlightened not to feel almost unconsciously the “Garn, ’oo are yer gettin’ at?” which rises to the lips of our less cultured citizens on being treated to any address at all elaborately flavoured. There is sound sense, not merely boorishness, at the bottom of this instinctive suspicion, for forms and ceremonies are at their best a mask to conceal more natural emotions, though we do not always too nicely judge the moments when these emotions might be more profitably concealed than revealed. At the same time, the English wife expects a good deal of attention from the man who, presumably, first won her by his attentions, and feels aggrieved if she does not get it. The English husband—and he would be the first to admit it—is expected to remain _l’amant de sa femme_ and to abound in those attentions great and small which are easily prompted by the emotion of passionate love, but sprout less eagerly from the more solid but less exciting relation of the _ami_, in the conjugal sense of that word. The happiest wife has her _amant_ and _ami_ in one, and she is slow, for all that the novelists and dramatists may say, to look for the former away from home. Most of our country women are more ready to face the great disillusionment with resignation than to seek a new revelation as an antidote. But it is not easy to destroy the illusions of an Englishwoman or, as it may be better put, they are not often totally destroyed. One reason for this, perhaps the chief, is that neither the Englishman nor Englishwoman have, in early life, formed a passionate ideal of _l’amour_ to be destroyed in the process of daily realisation. They regard the prospect of “settling down” with equanimity, having usually had before their eyes an example of the amount of tenderness and affection which attend the settlement, and being too practical to imagine themselves ever taking desperate and decisive action to assuage a merely emotional longing for an intangible something. We are too ready adventurers in the realm of the concrete to waste our energy on less promising quests in the realm of ideas. All our adventures, marriage included, have a practical aim which keeps our roving desires in a fairly domesticated condition, like house terriers who hunt a rabbit now and then rather than greyhounds for ever straining at the leash. The English wife views her husband’s rabbit hunts with the complacency of a good mistress, quite ready to admire the good figure that he cuts, provided the chase is not tiresomely prolonged.