CHAPTER V.
A MISTAKE ON JOHN'S PART.
It is not discreditable to the sex to assert that a man is first attracted marriage-ward by the desire of the eye.

He falls in love, as a rule, because she who presently becomes the only woman in the universe to him is goodly to view, if not actually beautiful.

Goodliness being largely contingent upon apparel, it follows that Mary dresses for John--up to the marriage-day.

He who descries signs of slatternliness in his beloved prior to that date, may well be shocked to disillusionment.
As a girl in a home where the mother takes upon herself the heaviest work, and spares her pretty daughter's hands and clothes all the soil and wear she can avert, Mary must be indolent or phenomenally indifferent to what occupies so much of other women's thoughts, if she do not always appear in her lover's presence neatly and--to the best of her ability--becomingly attired.

She quickly acquaints herself with his taste in the matter of women's costumes, and adapts hers to it, wearing his favorite colors, giving preference to the gowns he has praised, and arranging her hair in the fashion he has chanced to admire in her hearing.
In the work-a-day world of matrimonial life, much of all this undergoes a change.