Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/389

 popular: he would drive the sharpest bargain with Destiny. His wife's impetuous movement of love oversets and spills out her calculation. Many a woman is capable of regarding all the consequences of an act, but she must not love too deeply: if she does, she will stick at nothing. If there be motive enough, she can turn a lover into a criminal, and then, with perjury, deceit, unblushing cheek, will screen him: they twain are one, for better, for worse. They are too deeply compromised to haggle about salvation. The very intercourse of sex devotes a woman: she has become flesh and blood of another. This complicity of nature engages the most imperious nerve-centres of her life. Were she aware of this beforehand, as she is not, it would not be evaded nor entitled bondage. If her lover has been always above her suspicion, the discovery on his part of some ill-doing is seldom violent enough to tear this bond: her revulsion is against a prying world that is no better than it should be; and she will help to secrete what she is too proud to have attributed to him. It is one article in the creed of a detective that a man's wife is more baffling than circumstance, more loyal than conscience. She is chaste clear through and single-hearted. Only when love itself is wounded and disgraced will she resign the culprit lover to the scorn of men; but not always even then, for it is her concern, and earth and heaven may keep out of it. But let him forge, she will secrete him, smuggle him out of the country, join him afterward to comfort him. Let him counterfeit any thing but love, and she will help to put the spurious