improved. This was all very well, but they might just as
reasonably have bidden him reject plain food because a few years
hence he would be able to purchase luxuries; he could not do
without nourishment of some sort, and the time had come when he
could not do without a wife. Many a man with brains but no money
has been compelled to the same step. Educated girls have a
pronounced distaste for London garrets; not one in fifty thousand
would share poverty with the brightest genius ever born. Seeing
that marriage is so often indispensable to that very success
which would enable a man of parts to mate equally, there is
nothing for it but to look below one's own level, and be grateful
to the untaught woman who has pity on one's loneliness.

Unfortunately, Alfred Yule was not so grateful as he might have
been. His marriage proved far from unsuccessful; he might have
found himself united to a vulgar shrew, whereas the girl had the
great virtues of humility and kindliness. She endeavoured to
learn of him, but her dulness and his impatience made this
attempt a failure; her human qualities had to suffice. And they
did, until Yule began to lift his head above the literary mob.
Previously, he often lost his temper with her, but never
expressed or felt repentance of his marriage; now he began to see
only the disadvantages of his position, and, forgetting the facts
of the case, to imagine that he might well have waited for a wife
who could share his intellectual existence. Mrs Yule had to pass
through a few years of much bitterness. Already a martyr to
dyspepsia, and often suffering from bilious headaches of extreme
violence, her husband now and then lost all control of his
temper, all sense of kind feeling, even of decency, and
reproached the poor woman with her ignorance, her stupidity, her