regulated machine. Sometimes, alas! the calmest man is
carried away in the torrent, bandies adjectives with the best,
and out-Herods Herod for some shameful moments. When you
remember that, you will be tempted to put things strongly, and
say you will marry no one who is not like George the Second,
and cannot state openly a distaste for poetry and painting.

The word "facts" is, in some ways, crucial. I have
spoken with Jesuits and Plymouth Brethren, mathematicians and
poets, dogmatic republicans and dear old gentlemen in bird's-
eye neckcloths; and each understood the word "facts" in an
occult sense of his own. Try as I might, I could get no
nearer the principle of their division. What was essential to
them, seemed to me trivial or untrue. We could come to no
compromise as to what was, or what was not, important in the
life of man. Turn as we pleased, we all stood back to back in
a big ring, and saw another quarter of the heavens, with
different mountain-tops along the sky-line and different
constellations overhead. We had each of us some whimsy in the
brain, which we believed more than anything else, and which
discoloured all experience to its own shade. How would you
have people agree, when one is deaf and the other blind? Now
this is where there should be community between man and wife.
They should be agreed on their catchword in "FACTS OF
RELIGION," or "FACTS OF SCIENCE," or "SOCIETY, MY DEAR"; for
without such an agreement all intercourse is a painful strain
upon the mind. "About as much religion as my William likes,"
in short, that is what is necessary to make a happy couple of
any William and his spouse. For there are differences which
no habit nor affection can reconcile, and the Bohemian must