their capital, in
order to be quite sure that when the days of rest will become a
necessity, that capital will be there to keep them, if not in wealth, at
all events in comfort and complete independence.

* * *

When married couples have nothing better to do, they should amuse
themselves making all sorts of plans for the future. They should plan
journeys to distant countries, build castles in the air, buy country
houses, and consult each other and decide how they shall furnish them
and lay out the grounds. These plans are like barricades--they mask the
future; besides, they cause you amusement and cost nothing. And--who
knows?--among those many plans perhaps there will be one of your
predilections that you will actually be able to realize. What happens
then? Plans are akin to caresses--they go together hand in hand; they
are the gratuitous pleasures of sweet intimacy.

* * *

Young married people should avoid being too demonstrative, not only in
public, but in private, in the first years especially. They should
constantly remember that they enter the state of matrimony with a
certain capital of love. They must not squander that capital, but live
on the interest of it only.

* * *

There are young people who too often feel the want of manifesting their
love by exaggerated proofs of tenderness, such as the administration to
each other of names of birds and pet quadrupeds, of showers of kisses,
of little pats on the face. The exaggerated frequency of such acts
produces a reaction, and often a slight sensation of enervation, that
should never be born of caresses. And as these outward shows of love run
the risk of diminishing in number and fervour, there is danger of their
thus becoming a sign or a proof of decline in tenderness.

In public these demonstrations are ridiculous and vulgar; they put other
people ill at ease, who smile and sneer, and even remark, 'They will
soon get over it.'

CHAPTER VI

RAMBLES ABOUT MATRIMONY--III

To marry a beautiful woman for the mere love of her beauty is to
undertake to dwell in a country that has a temperature of 100 in the
shade without being provided with clothes that will enable you to stand
a winter of 50 below zero when it comes.

* * *

In the relations between men and women it is, after all, beauty that
makes woman particularly attractive to man. For this reason, the love of
a man is more sensual, more jealous, than th