The wife, too, is up in arms about mere trifles—her husband’s commonplace soul, his narrowness, his materialism, his egotism, his gross old-bachelor ways. Her real grievances, to say nothing of her fancied ones, are innumerable. One woman finds, instead of the “morning dew” of her dreams, that she has espoused a lumpish lout.[100] Another, brought up in a part of the country where hunting was the stock topic of conversation, feels aggrieved if her husband tries to engage her practical interest in literature or music, the result of which is so complete a discord that the husband at last packs her off to her father, who promptly sends her back again. Another lady is wretched because her good man loses his appetite, and in bed does nothing but sigh; on this foundation she builds a whole world of suppositions, and finishes by making life impossible to the poor man, who is all the time at a loss to know why: as a matter of fact, he has been worried about an investment. There are some women odious because of their incessant chattering, their tempers, their vanity. Many women are desperately fond of contradicting their husbands, tormenting them with pin-pricks. At table a husband inadvertently poured water into his wife’s glass. The lady handed the glass to a footman, saying hotly: “When it is dry, I will ask for it back.”[101] These are the things which destroy domestic happiness, which poison a man’s life (“wine and women have their poison,” says an old proverb), which disgust and shrivel the heart of a woman and drive her to a life away from her home, in pilgrimages or what not. A man does not need to be a saint to bear with a woman of easy virtue, but only a saint can endure a wearing woman. And so what is wanted in domestic life is a great deal of prudence and wisdom, and as little as possible of illusions and passion. Marriage is the most sacred bond in the world, but only so long as it is not strained. To yield to the temptation of loving would be fraught with great peril; that is the forbidden fruit. Champier, a philosophical physician of the time, calls it fatal: it kills. Leaving out of account the physical vicissitudes of life, the spirit of man is too fickle to permit him safely to stake his life on one head.[102] Of this, Europe had a terrifying proof.