And that was his wife! Good gracious! That little, plain, unpretending, quiet body, with not even a "stylish" air to recommend her! It was awful. _Why?_--didn't she love him? Oh, yes; how could she help it? Was she not a good mother to his children? Oh, yes. Was she not a careful, orderly housekeeper? Oh, yes. Was she not sensible and well-informed, and able to take a creditable place as conversationalist at his table and fireside? Oh, yes all of that; but _he_ should have had an elegant, talented, brilliant wife. _No he shouldn't._ He has just the wife he wants. A practical, common-sense woman, proud of her husband in her own demonstrative way. Smiling quietly at the world's estimate of the unostentatious virtues, which make his home a pattern of neatness, order and comfort. Smiling quietly, as the conscious possessor of his heart could afford to do, at the meddling short-sightedness which would displace her "brilliant, talented woman," whom ten to one, even had she good sense with her brilliancy he never would like half as well, because God has endowed few men with magnanimity enough to rejoice in those qualities which make a wife--like her husband--resourceful and self-reliant. No--no, my friends, let them alone. What affair is it of yours, if they themselves are content? Ah--but we won't believe they _are_ content. We persist in pitying him. We could pick out twenty splendid women with whom he would be better mated. Very like--my dear madame;--and yourself, first of the twenty, no doubt! Pshaw! leave him with his patient, quiet, unobtrusive, sensible, good, little, homely wife. "A male genius"--my sentimental friend--likes a good dinner--plenty of _kicking_ room--and a wife who, if she differs from him in opinion, won't say so.
I trust that it involves no disloyalty to Queen Victoria to dislike Toronto; it is the last of her Majesty's dominions that I should select for a residence. Its tumble-down, dilapidated aspect, its almost total absence of adornment in architecture, or ornamentation in shrubbery, was, I confess, very repelling to me. One excepts, of course, what is called the "College Walk," leading to the fine new University buildings and grounds, consisting of an entire mile of handsome shade trees, but alas! a line-and-plummet, undeviating, straight mile, innocent of the faintest suspicion of a curve. Still, on the pleasant afternoon we walked there, we enjoyed it, as well as the sight of the crowd, dressed in holiday attire, sauntering past us. I saw no beauty in their faces, but a look of jolly health, which, to my eye, was quite as pleasing. The young girls, perhaps, looked a trifle too theatrical, in the little straw crowns of hats without brim, a large ostrich feather being curled over the forehead, instead. This head-dress, worn with quite ordinary dresses, seemed to me incongruous, and not in good taste; but one forgives much to a sunny, bright face, and this would be a very monotonous world, were all individuality destroyed. It struck me that there was an immense number of sixteen-year-old young girls in Toronto; perhaps their mothers and aunts don't go out, or _they_ may be youthful mothers and aunts--who knows? It struck me, too, that the Torontonians enjoyed themselves; every face wearing a smiling, care-free expression, rare to meet in larger places; so, if they like their pigs to run loose in the street, who shall say them nay, provided they don't trip up the Prince of Wales?