stinct; otherwise he would to this day have remained among the
anthropoid apes. He has turned away from nature, become unnatural, as it
were, disliked the earth upon which he found himself, and changed the
face of it somewhat to his liking. His trend has been, and still is, to
perform more and more acts with a rational sanction. He has developed a
moral nature, made laws, and by the sheer force of his will and reason
curbed his lyings and his lusts.

However, our lovers are natural and uninventive. They get married.
Pursuit, with all its Tantalus delights, its sighings and its songs, is
gone, never to return. And in its place is possession, which is
satisfaction, familiarity, knowledge. It heralds the return of
rationality, the return to duty of the weighing and measuring qualities
of the mind. Our lovers discover each other to be mere man and woman
after all. That ethereal substance which the man took for the body of
the loved one becomes flesh and blood, prone to the common weaknesses
and ills of flesh and blood. He, on the other hand, betrays little
petulancies of disposition, little faults and predispositions of which
she never dreamed in the pre-nuptial days, and which she now finds
eminently distasteful. But at first these things are not openly
unpleasant. There are no scenes. One or the other gives in on the
instant, without self-betrayal, and one or the other retires to have a
secret cry or to ruminate about it over a cigar--the first faint hints,
I may slyly suggest, of the return of rationality. _They are beginning
to think._

Ah, these are little things, you say. Precisely; wherefore I lay
emphasis upon them. The sum of the innumerable little things becomes a
mighty thing to test the human soul. Moreover, many a home has been
broken because of disagreement as to the uses or abuses of couch
cushions, and more than one divorce induced by the lingering of tobacco
odours in the curtains.

If the marriage of our lovers conform to the majority of marriages, the
first year of their wedded life will determine whether they are able to
share bed and board through the lengthening years. For this first
year--often the first months of it--marks the transition from love to
conjugal affection, or witnesses a rupture which nothing less than
omnipotence can ever mend. In the first year a serious readjustment must
take place. Unreason, as a basis for the relation, must give way to
reason; blind, ignorant, selfish little lov