rush nature.

A thing is not necessarily good because it exists, for scarlet fever,
nationality, art critics, and black beetles exist, yet all will be
rooted out in the course of enlightenment. Marriage may be an invention
of the male to secure himself a woman freehold, or, at least, in fee
simple. It may be an invention of the female designed to secure a
somewhat tyrannical protection and a precarious sustenance. Marriage may
be afflicted with inherent diseases, with antiquity, with spiritual
indigestion, or starvation: among these confusions the
socio-psychologist, swaying between the solidities of polygamy and the
shadows of theosophical union, loses all idea of the norm. There may be
no norm, either in Christian marriage, polygamy, Meredithian marriage
leases; there may be a norm only in the human aspiration to utility and
to happiness.

For we know very little save the aimlessness of a life that may be
paradise, or its vestibule, or an instalment of some other region. Still
there is a key, no doubt: the will to happiness, which, alas! opens
doors most often into empty rooms. It is the search for happiness that
has envenomed marriage and made it so difficult to bear, because in the
first rapture it is so hard to realize that there are no ways of
living, but only ways of dying more or less agreeably.

Personally, I believe that with all its faults, with its crudity, its
stupidity shot with pain, marriage responds to a human need to live
together and to foster the species, and that though we will make it
easier and approach free union, we shall always have something of the
sort. And so, because I believe it eternal, I think it necessary.

But why does it fare so ill? Why is it that when we see in a restaurant
a middle-aged couple, mutually interested and gay, we say: "I wonder if
they are married?" Why do so many marriages persist when the love knot
slips, and bandages fall away from the eyes? Strange cases come to my
mind: M 6 and M 22, always apart, except to quarrel, meanly jealous,
jealously mean, yet full of affability--to strangers; M 4 and many
others, all poor, where at once the wife has decayed; when you see youth
struggling in vain on the features under the cheap hat, you need not
look at the left hand: she is married. It is true that however much they
may decay in pride of body and pride of life, when all allowances are
made for outer gaiety and grace, the married of forty are a sounder,
deeper folk tha