He should be weak in character,
he may be pleasant in manner and appearance, and he must be both poor
and extravagant. If to these qualities be added, first a wife, young,
good-looking, and in most respects similar to her husband, though of
a stronger will, and secondly a friend, rich, determined, strictly
unprincipled, and thoroughly unscrupulous, the conditions which
produce the Tolerated Husband may be said to be complete.
The Tolerated Husband may have been at one time an officer in a good
regiment. Having married, he finds that his pay, combined with a
moderate private income, and a generous allowance of indebtedness, due
to the gratification of expensive tastes, is insufficient to maintain
him in that position of comfort to which he conceives himself to be
entitled. He therefore abandons the career of arms, and becomes one of
those who attempt spasmodically to redeem commercial professions from
the taint of mere commercialism by becoming commercial themselves.
It is certain that the gilded society which turns up a moderately
aristocratic nose at trade and tradesmen, looks with complete
indulgence upon an ex-officer who dabbles in wine, or associates
himself with a new scheme for the easy manufacture of working-men's
boots.
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