"Do not marry unless you must depend on each other for daily bread, or unless you are rich enough to live apart." Yes, it is true, in ninetynine cases out of a hundred.

But then, I should add a saving clause, "and unless you are quite sure that you love each other." Ay, there is the _pons asinorum,_ the bridge whereon young asses and old fools come to such terrible grief.

They are perfectly sure they love eternally; they will indignantly scorn the suggestions of prudence; love any other woman?
never, while I live, answers the happy and unsophisticated youth.

Be sorry I did it?
Do you think I am a schoolboy in my first passion?
demands the aged bridegroom.

And so they marry, and in a year or two the enthusiastic young man runs away with some other enthusiastic man's wife, and the octogenarian spouse finds himself constituted into a pot of honey for his wife's swarming relations to settle on, like flies.