做一个完美的妻子(A Perfect Wife)
after thirty years of married happiness, he could still remind himself that victoria was
endowed with every charm except the thrilling touch of human frailty.though her perfection
discouraged pleasures, especially the pleasures of love, he had learned in time to feel the
pride of a husband in her natural frigidity. for he still clung, amidthe decay of moral platitudes,
to the discredited ideal of chivalry. in his youth the world was suffused with the after-glow of
the long victorian age, and a graceful feminine style had softened the manners, if not the
natures, of men.at the end of that interesting epoch, when womanhood was exalted from a biological
fact into a miraculous power, virginius littlepage, the younger son of an old and affluent family,
had married victoria brooke, the grand-daughter of a tobacco planter, who had made a satisfactory
fortune by forsaking his plantation and converting tobacco into cigarettes. while virginius had
been trained by stern tradition to respect every woman who had not stooped to folly, the virtue
peculiar toher sex was among the least of his reasons for admiring victoria. she was not only
modest, which was usual in the neties, but she was beautiful, which is unusual in any decade.in
the beginning of their acquaintance he had gone even further and ascribed intellect to her; but
a few months of marriage had shown this to be merely one of the many delusions created by
perfect features and noble expression. everything about her had been smooth and definite,
even the tones of her voice and the way her light brown hair, which she wore ?la pompadour,
was rolled stiffly back from her forehead and coiled in a burnished rope on the top of her head
a serious young man, ambitious to attain a place in the world more brilliant than the secluded
seat of his ancestors, he had been impressed at their first meeting by the compactness and
precision of victoria's orderly mind.for in that earnest period the minds, as well as the emotions,
of lovers were orderly. it was an age when eager young men flocked to church on sunday morning,
and eloquent divines discoursed upon the victorian poets in the middle of the week. he could afford
to smile now when he recalled the solemn browning class in which he had first lost his heart. how
passionately he had admired victoria's virginal features! how fervently he had envied her competent
but caressing way with the poet! incredible as it seemed to him now, he had fallen in love with her
while she recited from the more ponderous passages in the ring and the book.
he had fallen in love with her then, though he had never really enjoyed browning, and it had been a
relief to him when the unseen, in company with its illustrious poet, had a
t last gone out of fashion.yet, since he was disposed to admire all the qualities
he did not possess, he had never ceased torespect the firmness with which victoria
continued to deal in other forms with the absolute. as theplacid years passed, and she
came to rely less upon her virginal features, it seemed to him that the
ripe opinions of her youth began to shrink and flatten as fruit does that has hung too longon
the tree.she had never changed, he realized, since he had first known her; she had become
merely riper,softer,and sweeter in nature. her advantage rested where advantage never fails
to rest, in moral fervour. to be invariably right was her single wifely failing. for his wife,
he sighed, with the vague unrest of a husband whose infidelities are imaginary, was a genuinely
good woman. she was as far removed from pretence as she was from the posturing
virtues that flourish in the credulous world of the drama.the pity of it was that even
the least exacting husband should so oftendesire something more piquant than goodness.