Page:Vindication Women's Rights (Wollstonecraft).djvu/68

62 may have whom he is detined to marry. Let her only determine, without being too anxious about preent happines, to acquire the qualities that ennoble a rational being, and a rough inelegant huband may hock her tate without detroying her peace of mind. She will not model her oul to uit the frailties of her companion, but to bear with them: his character may be a trial, but not an impediment to virtue.

If Dr. Gregory confined his remark to romantic expectations of contant love and congenial feelings, he hould have recollected that experience will banih what advice can never make us ceae to wih for, when the imagination is kept alive at the expene of reaon.

I own it frequently happens that women who have fotered a romantic unnatural delicacy of feeling, wate their lives in imagining how happy they hould have been with a huband who could love them with a fervid increaing affection every day, and all day. But they might as well pine married as ingle—and would not be a jot more unhappy with a bad huband than longing for a good one. That a proper education; or, to peak with more preciion, a well tored mind, would enable a woman to upport a ingle life with dignity, I grant; but that he hould avoid cultivating her tate, let her huband hould occaionally hock it, is quitting a ubtance for a hadow. To ay the truth, I do not know of what ue is an improved tate, if the individual is not rendered more independent of the caualties of life; if new ources of enjoyment, only dependent on the olitary operations of the mind, are not&ensp;