The Collected Works of Wilkie Collins Quotes

“To state the proposition, generally, at the outset, I assert that the whole end and object of the Etiquette of Courtship and Matrimony is to insult, persecute, and degrade the bridegroom. I first became satisfied of this disgraceful fact at page thirty-six of the Hand Book or Manual. In the earlier part of the volume it was assumed that I had fallen in love, had made my offer, and had been accepted by my young woman and her family. Etiquette is hard on my heels all through those preliminary processes, and finally runs me down as soon as I appear in the character of an engaged man. My behaviour in my future wife’s company is of the last importance and there Etiquette has me, and never lets me go again. “In private,” says the Manual, “the slightest approach to familiarity must be avoided, as it will always be resented by a woman who deserves to be a wife.” So! I may be brimming over with affection; I may even have put on a soft waistcoat expressly for the purpose; but I am never to clasp my future wife with rapture to my bosom; I am never to print upon her soft cheek a momentary impression of the pattern of my upper shirt-stud! She is to keep me at arm’s length, in private as well as in public and I am actually expected to believe, all the time, that she is devotedly attached to me! First insult.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Collected Works of Wilkie Collins: PergamonMedia