and she would be a very high-souled mistress, and care greatly that her
master should not only be a good husband and a father, but should also
serve his generation as a good citizen and a true patriot. When the public
good demanded sacrifices, she would not drag him back by insisting on his
duty to his family, nor would she persuade him to rob the public stores,
or time, by taking little perquisites or shortening his office hours. She
would feel with De Tocqueville, who says, "A hundred times I have seen
weak men show real public virtue, because they had by their sides women
who supported them--not by advice as to particulars, but by fortifying
their feelings of duty, and by directing their ambition. More frequently,
I must confess, I have observed the domestic influence gradually
transforming a man, naturally generous, noble, and unselfish, into a
cowardly, commonplace, place-hunting, self-seeker, thinking of public
business only as the means of making himself comfortable; and this simply
by daily contact with a well-conducted woman, a faithful wife, an
excellent mother, but from whose mind the grand notion of public duty was
entirely absent."

The husband of "a superior woman" is usually much to be pitied, but surely
the reason is that the woman is not superior enough. She has capabilities
and knowledge, and has learnt to value them, and is right in so doing,
but she has not learnt the next page of Life's Lesson Book, which is, the
relative insignificance of her own acquirements, and the value of the
qualities she has not got,--qualities which her husband very likely
possesses, only he has not the feminine power of expression. How often a
woman's seeming superiority lies in this gift of words, which, as George
Eliot says, is in her, "often a fatal aptitude for expressing what she
neither believes nor feels." The man often silently knows, and _lives_,
the noble sentiment, which the woman fluently utters, imagining herself to
be its discoverer and prophet. Another point to remember in this matter is