Part 16

If he wishes to see any lady to her carriage, he asks her permission to do so, folds her wraps round her, hands her in, and stands until the carriage has gone some yards away.

ENGAGEMENT AND MARRIAGE.

The old-fashioned rule that a man must approach the father of a girl before offering himself in marriage to her has now, to some extent, died out.

At the same time it is considered dishonourable for any one to propose to a girl in the face of the decided disapprobation of her family. Clandestine courtship is also regarded as dishonourable, except in circumstances where the girl is unhappy or oppressed and needs a champion.

The usual way to ask for the admired one’s hand in marriage is in person. This is always preferable to writing, though some men have not the courage to adopt the first course.

Should the lady accept the offer, the happy wooer must take the earliest opportunity of seeing her father, or, failing him, her nearest friend, and begging him to permit the engagement. Should he consent, all is well; but in the contrary case, his decision must be accepted. To allow a girl to engage herself against the wish of her family

is to drag her into a false position. Very often submission to the decree effects more towards procuring its reversal than violent opposition. It is difficult, of course, for young people to be patient, but if they can only manage a little of it they would find the truth of the French proverb, “All things come round to those who know how to wait.”

Immediately upon having the engagement ratified, the accepted suitor gives the lady an engagement ring. This should be as handsome a present as he can afford to buy. Together with all other presents and correspondence on both sides, this ring must be returned if the engagement should be broken off.

The accepted man is in duty bound to spend most of his leisure with his intended bride. He must not go off for a sojourn abroad while she is spending some weeks by the sea in England, unless she has expressed a wish to that effect. It would be a considerable “snub” to her to do so.

Society has sometimes been amused by the announcement one day of a “marriage having been arranged between Mr. A. and Miss B.,” and on the next of the intention of Mr. A. to start for a tour round the world. This almost always means that the man has been entrapped into a proposal, and would willingly retreat if he honourably could. Such things happen only too often. Manœuvring mothers have much to answer for in the matter. Worldly girls have often sufficient wisdom of the serpent to bring a reluctant wooer to the point and, by immediately announcing the engagement to their friends, to make it extremely difficult for him to retreat.

Sometimes a girl falls so wildly in love with a man that she creates a kind of corresponding, though passing, fervour in him, and while it lasts he believes himself in love, though his emotions are only a mixture of gratified vanity and that physical attraction which needs true love to redeem it from the fleshly sort.

Should marriage follow upon such courtships as these, where the girl takes ever the initiative, the union is very seldom a happy one. The wife never feels sure that her husband really loves her or would have chosen her. She knows that he was her choice, rather than she his, and a racking jealousy seizes her and makes her not only miserable herself, but a very uncomfortable companion for him.

He, too, often finds when it is too late that she fulfils none of his ideals, and is in many ways a contrast to the girl he would have chosen if she had not whirled him into the vortex of her own strong feeling. And he occasionally wonders if she may not some day experience a similar strength of attraction for some other man and let herself be carried away by it as she had been by her feeling for him. “Hot fires soon burn out,” he thinks, and remembers the warning given to Othello: “She hath deceived her father, and may thee.”

No man should drag a girl into a long engagement. Nor should any man propose to a girl until he is in a position to provide for her.

He is only standing in the way of other wooers who may be well supplied with this world’s gear. Such trifles as wealth and ease may appear as nought to the mind of the youthful lover, not to be weighed for a moment in the balance with love and young romance. The girl, too, may be of the same way of thinking at the time, but it the more behoves the man, the stronger, to consider her and to remember that poverty is such a bitter and a cruel thing that it even kills love at times.

Recrimination in the home is a hard thing to bear. And yet how many millions of women since the world began have said to their husband: “Oh, why did I ever marry you? I could have done so much better.”

And how many men have said to their wives: “Well! You were determined to have me, so now you must make the best of me.”

However, we will suppose these rocks and quicksands past, the engaged couple happy, and the wedding day at hand.

Custom demands that the bridegroom shall present her bouquet to the bride, as well as bouquets and a present each to the bridesmaids. He must furnish the house for the bride in every detail, not excepting the house and table linen, which, in the old days of spinning-wheels, was wont to be contributed by the bride herself.

He must provide the wedding ring and the carriage in which his best man and himself go to church. He pays the fees to clergyman and clerk, but it is the best man who hands them over. With him the bridegroom waits at the altar till the bride arrives. She takes her place at his left hand for the first time, and at the proper moment he produces the ring which is the symbol of their union.

The usual dress of a bridegroom consists of a very dark blue frock-coat, light trousers, light or white scarf-tie, patent boots, and a new hat.

DRESS.

It is absolutely true, though in a very limited sense, that the tailor makes the man.

If a man does not dress well in society he cannot be a success. If he commits flagrant errors in costume he will not be invited out very much, of that he may be certain.

If he goes to a garden party in a frock-coat and straw hat, he is condemned more universally than if he had committed some crime. The evidence of the latter would not be upon him for all men to read, as the evidence of his ignorance in social forms is, in his mistaken notions of dress. Things are more involved than ever in the sartorial line, since so many new sports and pastimes have sprung up for men.

A man cannot consult his tailor upon every trifling detail, even if his tailor were always a perfectly reliable authority, which is not always the case, for there are tailors and tailors. A young man’s finances do not always allow him to go to one of the best, and the second and third-rate artists in cloth are apt to purvey second and third-rate fashions to their customers. A brief summary of the forms of dress appropriate to various occasions may be of some use to the inexperienced. It is obvious that to enter into detail would be out of place in a matter where change is the order of the day.

But there are certain fixed rules that are, in a sense, permanent, and with these I may succinctly deal.

For morning wear the morning-coat or jacket or the tweed suit is correct. After lunch, when in town, the well-dressed man may continue to wear his morning-coat or the regulation frock-coat, with trousers of some neat, striped grey mixture. The tailor’s name for the material of these is “mixed cheviots.”