"Because she's always trying to find a mate for you girls."

[Illustration: Sketch for illustration for "Wives and Daughters" 1865.]

And yet if the drawing accompanying this joke be looked at _first_, it
delights with its charm and distinction. Here then is a psychological
fact; the drawing itself seems to the eye a poorer affair once the poor
joke has been read. Having suffered in this way several times in
following with admiration the pencil of du Maurier through the old
volumes of _Punch_, we at last hit upon the plan of always covering the
joke and enjoying first the picture for its own sake, only uncovering
the legend when this has been thoroughly appreciated lest it should turn
out to be merely a feeble joke instead of a happily-invented
conversation. There are some of the drawings for jokes which we should
very much like to have included with our illustrations, but the human
mind being so constituted that it goes direct to the legend of an
illustration, feeling "sold" if it isn't there, and the "jokes" in some
of these instances being so fatal to the understanding of the atmosphere
and charm of the drawing, we have had to abandon the idea of doing so.
What the reader has to understand is that circumstances harnessed du
Maurier to a certain business; he imported all manner of extraneous
graces into it, and thus gave a determination to the character of the
art of satire which it will never lose. The pages of _Punch_ were
enriched, beautified, and made more delicately human. _Punch_ gained
everything through the connection and du Maurier a stimulus in the
demand for regular work. But it is not impossible to imagine
circumstances which, but for this early connection with _Punch_, would
have awakened and developed a different and perhaps profounder side of
du Maurier, of which we seem to get a glimpse in the illustrations to
Meredith in _The Cornhill Magazine_.