period of Mrs. Amos Barton's life, if she sketched or played the piano.
You would even perhaps have been rather scandalized if she had descended
from the serene dignity of _being_ to the assiduous unrest of _doing_.
Happy the man, you would have thought, whose eye will rest on her in the
pauses of his fireside reading--whose hot aching forehead will be soothed
by the contact of her cool soft hand who will recover himself from
dejection at his mistakes and failures in the loving light of her
unreproaching eyes! You would not, perhaps, have anticipated that this
bliss would fall to the share of precisely such a man as Amos Barton,
whom you have already surmised not to have the refined sensibilities for
which you might have imagined Mrs. Barton's qualities to be destined by
pre-established harmony. But I, for one, do not grudge Amos Barton this
sweet wife. I have all my life had a sympathy for mongrel ungainly dogs,
who are nobody's pets; and I would rather surprise one of them by a pat
and a pleasant morsel, than meet the condescending advances of the
loveliest Skye-terrier who has his cushion by my lady's chair. That, to
be sure, is not the way of the world: if it happens to see a fellow of
fine proportions and aristocratic mien, who makes no _faux pas_, and wins
golden opinions from all sorts of men, it straightway picks out for him
the loveliest of unmarried women, and says, _There_ would be a proper
match! Not at all, say I: let that successful, well-shapen, discreet and
able gentleman put up with something less than the best in the
matrimonial department; and let the sweet woman go to make sunshine and a
soft pillow for the poor devil whose legs are not models, whose efforts
are often blunders, and who in general gets more kicks than halfpence.
She--the sweet woman--will like it as well; for her sublime capacity of
loving will have all the more scope; and I venture to say, Mrs. Barton's
nature would never have grown half so angelic if she had married the man
you would perhaps have had in your eye for her--a man with sufficient
income and abundant personal eclat. Besides, Amos was an affectionate