ne' in a terrible
indissoluble completeness of which marriage is only an imperfect
counterpart....

"There could be no better proof of her extraordinary power over me, and
of the way she had managed to clear the air of sentimental illusion,
than the fact that I presently found myself putting this before her with
a merciless precision of touch.

"'If we love each other enough to do a thing like this, we must love
each other enough to see just what it is we're going to do.'

"So I invited her to the dissecting-table, and I see now the fearless
eye with which she approached the cadaver. 'For that's what it is, you
know,' she flashed out at me, at the end of my long demonstration. 'It's
a dead body, like all the instances and examples and hypothetical cases
that ever were! What do you expect to learn from thai? The first great
anatomist was the man who stuck his knife in a heart that was beating;
and the only way to find out what doing a thing will be like is to do
it!'

"She looked away from me suddenly, as if she were fixing her eyes on
some vision on the outer rim of consciousness. 'No: there's one other
way,' she exclaimed; 'and that is, _not_ to do it! To abstain and
refrain; and then see what we become, or what we don't become, in
the long run, and to draw our inferences. That's the game that almost
everybody about us is playing, I suppose; there's hardly one of the dull
people one meets at dinner who hasn't had, just once, the chance of a
berth on a ship that was off for the Happy Isles, and hasn't refused it
for fear of sticking on a sand-bank!

"'I'm doing my best, you know,' she continued, 'to see the sequel as
you see it, as you believe it's your duty to me to see it. I know the
instances you're thinking of: the listless couples wearing out their
lives in shabby watering places, and hanging on the favour of hotel
acquaintances; or the proud quarrelling wretches shut up alone in a fine
house because they're too good for the only society they can get, and
trying to cheat their boredom by squabbling with their tradesmen and
spying on their servants. No doubt there are such cases; but I don't
recognize either of us in those dismal figures. Why, to do it would be
to admit that our life, yours and mine, is in the people about us
and not in ourselves; that we're parasites and not self-sustaining
creatures; and that the lives we're leading now are so brilliant, full
and satisfying that what we should have to give u