I reject the suggestion made by cynic
men that no married pair can live without quarrelling. No married pair
who were fools before marriage can avoid dissension; but, when man and
wife make their choice wisely and cautiously, the notion of a quarrel
is too horrible to dream of.
IX.
SHREWS.
The greatest masters who ever made studies of the shrew in fiction or
in history have never, after all, given us a strictly scientific
definition of the creature. They let her exhibit herself in all her
drollery or her hatefulness, but they act in somewhat lordly fashion
by leaving us to frame our definition from the picturesque data which
they supply. Mrs. Mackenzie, in "The Newcomes," is repulsive to an
awful degree, but the figure is as true as true can be, and most of
us, no doubt, have seen the type in all its loathsomeness only too
many times. Mrs. Mackenzie is a shrew of one sort, but we could not
take her vile personality as the basis of a classification. Mrs.
Raddle is one of that lower middle-class which Dickens knew so well,
still she is not hateful or vile, or anything but droll. I know how
maddening that kind of woman can be in real life to those immediately
about her, but onlookers find her purely funny; they never think of
poor Bob Sawyer's cruel humiliation; they only laugh themselves
helpless over the screeching little woman on the stairs, who humbles
her wretched consort and routs the party with such consummate
strategy.
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