Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/204

172 "the only man in the world who could manage me," and to this it may be added that she was the only woman in the world who would have suited him. No other woman could have held him as she did. The very qualities which made her different to the ordinary run of women were those which made her the ideal wife for a man like Richard Burton. The eagle does not mate with the domestic hen, and in Isabel's unconventional and adventurous temperament Burton saw the reflex of his own. Though holding different views on some things, they had the same basic principles; and though their early environment and education had been widely different, yet Nature, the greatest force of all, had brought them together and blended them into one. It was a union of affinities. Isabel merged her life in her husband's. She sacrificed everything to him save two things—her rare individuality, and her fervent faith in her religion. The first she could not an she would; the second she would not an she could; and to his honour be it said he never demanded it of her. But in all else she was his absolutely; her passionate ideals, the treasure of her love, her life's happiness—all were his to cherish or to mar as he might please. She had a high ideal of the married state. "I think," she writes, "a true woman who is married to her proper mate recognizes the fully performed mission, whether prosperous or not, and no one can ever take his place for her as an interpreter of that which is between her and her Creator, to her the shadow of God's protection here on earth." And her conception of a wife's duty was an equally unselfish one, for she wrote of the