married, and the love-dream of the girl died in the arms of the husband. How many ideals are shattered by the intimacy of marriage, simply because the antenuptial love has been based upon fiction and misunderstanding. If only a man and woman made their several motives for marrying quite clear to one another, and were not so anxious to preserve a veneer of romance up to the very altar, matrimony would not be the terrible iconoclast it too often is. Unless it supplies the true complement to a single life, of what value is it? It is all very well to talk about individualism, but everything in the world is relative. The wife is what the husband makes her, and _vice versâ_; but the former is the more important consideration, since woman is more dependent. Pray forgive me, ye Amazons of the platform, ye of the Emancipated Sisterhood! Mrs. Hearthside went to her husband with a soul yearning for poetry, and he gave her the plainest prose. The soft speech and gentle ways were for his patients, not for his wife. His domestic manner was as brusque as his professional was persuasive and engaging. He had no time to show his wife any of those little tender attentions which had previously touched her, and had made her recognise that this man might realise for her the dream of happiness which another had revealed to her. On the contrary, he did not take long to teach her that life was a scientific fact, specially intended to prove the value of the medical profession, and of Dr. Hearthside in particular; that all emotion was ridiculous, except in so far as it concerned a professional diagnosis, and that the aim and end of domestic happiness was to keep a comfortable home, and make a respectable show to invite patients. And for this she had given up the freedom of her soul; for this she had stopped all supplies of the love her nature needed. Henceforth her heart must feed upon itself, for Mrs. Hearthside holds very select views with regard to a wife’s duties. If a husband do not answer all her spiritual longings, no other man must; if she cannot nestle her heart against his for warmth and comfort, her heart must go separate, cold, and lonely. Marriage has been a bitter disillusioning to her but she must bear with it, she must hide her romance away in the recesses of her memory, and live on the matter-of-fact of marriage, present a brave front, and pretend not to care, until in time, perhaps, she will delude herself into the belief that it is all the better so, at all events for her husband, and certainly for her children.