Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/176

 exceptions which, illogical people assert, prove the rule." There is a vibration of his teeth wanting only lips to become a sneer, while he replies—

"In my own case I was not so lucky, but I kept my heart up and went on with my search to the end."

"Exactly," I retort in triumph; "you, too, spent a lifetime looking for the four-leaved shamrock, and never found it after all. But I think women are far more unreasonable than ourselves in this desire for the unattainable, this disappointment when illusion fades into reality. Not only in their husbands do they expect perfection, and that too in defiance of daily experience, of obvious incompetency, but in their servants, their tradespeople, their carriages, their horses, their rooms, their houses, the dinners they eat, and the dresses they wear. With them an avowal of incapacity to reconcile