"'Nobody ever taught me to work,' she said, 'and I did not marry under a promise to begin again at the _a_, _b_, _c_ of things. Whatever I know I have learned by intuition, by reading without aim or method. I am a woman; my destiny is to love my husband and bring up children. It is very strange that my husband should be the person who counsels me to think of something better.'" I am far from suggesting that Madame Valvèdre is an exact representative of her sex, but the sentiments which in her are exaggerated, and expressed with passionate plainness, are in much milder form very prevalent sentiments indeed; and Valvèdre's great difficulty, how to get leave to prosecute his studies with the degree of devotion necessary to make them fruitful, is not at all an uncommon difficulty with intellectual men after marriage. The character of Madame Valvèdre, being passionate and excessive, led her to an open expression of her feelings; but feelings of a like kind, though milder in degree, exist frequently below the surface, and may be detected by any vigilant observer of human nature. That such feelings are very natural it is impossible even for a _savant_ to deny; but whilst admitting the clear right of a woman to be preferred by a man to science when once he has married her, let me observe that the man might perhaps do wisely, before the knot is tied, to ascertain whether her intellectual dowry is rich enough to compensate him for the sacrifices she is likely to exact. LETTER VI. TO A SOLITARY STUDENT. Need of a near intellectual friendship in solitude--Persons who live independently of custom run a peculiar risk in marriage--Women by nature more subservient to custom than men are--Difficulty of conciliating solitude and marriage--De Sénancour--The marriages of eccentrics--Their wives either protect them or attempt to reform them. Isolated as you are, by the very superiority of your culture, from the ignorant provincial world around you, I cannot but believe that marriage is essential to your intellectual health and welfare. If you married some cultivated woman, bred in the cultivated society of a great capital, that companionship would give you an independence of surrounding influences which nothing else can give. You fancy that by shutting yourself up in a country house you are uninfluenced by the world around you. It is a great error. You know that you are isolated, that you are looked upon and probably ridiculed as an eccentric, and this knowledge, which it is impossible to banish from your mind, deprives your thinking of elasticity and grace. You urgently need the support of an intellectual friendship quite near to you, under your own roof. Bachelors in great cities feel this necessity less.