No More Learning

How can a man who has
never married; who cannot be trusted to pick up at sight a moderately
sound horse; whose head is hot and upset with visions of domestic
felicity, go about the choosing of a wife? He cannot see straight or
think straight if he tries; and the same disadvantages exist in the
case of a girl's fancies. But when mature, married and discreet people
arrange a match between a boy and a girl, they do it sensibly, with a
view to the future, and the young couple live happily ever afterwards.
As everybody knows.

Properly speaking, Government should establish a Matrimonial Department,
efficiently officered, with a Jury of Matrons, a Judge of the Chief
Court, a Senior Chaplain, and an Awful Warning, in the shape of a
love-match that has gone wrong, chained to the trees in the courtyard.
All marriages should be made through the Department, which might be
subordinate to the Educational Department, under the same penalty as
that attaching to the transfer of land without a stamped document. But
Government won't take suggestions. It pretends that it is too busy.
However, I will put my notion on record, and explain the example that
illustrates the theory.

Once upon a time there was a good young man--a first-class officer in
his own Department--a man with a career before him and, possibly, a K.
C. G. E. at the end of it. All his superiors spoke well of him, because
he knew how to hold his tongue and his pen at the proper times.
There
are today only eleven men in India who possess this secret; and they
have all, with one exception, attained great honor and enormous incomes.

This good young man was quiet and self-contained--too old for his years
by far. Which always carries its own punishment. Had a Subaltern, or a
Tea-Planter's Assistant, or anybody who enjoys life and has no care for
tomorrow, done what he tried to do not a soul would have cared. But when
Peythroppe--the estimable, virtuous, economical, quiet, hard-working,
young Peythroppe--fell, there was a flutter through five Departments.

The manner of his fall was in this way. He met a Miss
Castries--d'Castries it was originally, but the family dropped the
d' for administrative reasons--and he fell in love with her even more
energetically than he worked. Understand clearly that there was not a
breath of a word to be said against Miss Castries--not a shadow of a
breath. She was good and very lovely--possessed what innocent people at
home call a "Spanish" complexion, with thick blue-black hair growing low
down on her forehead, into a "widow's peak," and big violet eyes
under eyebrows as black and as straight as the borders of a Gazette
Extraordinary when a big man dies. But--but--but--. Well, she was a VERY
sweet girl and very pious, but for many reasons she was "impossible. "
Quite so. All good Mammas know what "impossible" means. It was obviously
absurd that Peythroppe should marry her. The little opal-tinted onyx
at the base of her finger-nails said this as plainly as print.
Further, marriage with Miss Castries meant marriage with several other
Castries--Honorary Lieutenant Castries, her Papa, Mrs.