d of the fire that died before they were begotten.

* * *

I don't know who it was who first coined the phrase 'the appalling
intimacy of married life'; certainly it is an apt expression, and one
wonders at what period in the world's history men and women began to
find that intimacy 'appalling.' It sounds a modern enough complaint, and
somehow one feels sure it was never indulged in by our grandmothers, who
looked upon their husbands as a kind of visible embodiment of the Lord's
Will, and respected them accordingly. They would never have dreamed of
finding irksome what Mrs Lynn Linton called the '_chair-a-chair_
closeness of the English home.'

Much has been written of the degradation of love by habit, and Alexandre
Dumas expresses the whole question to perfection in one crystal
sentence: 'In marriage when love exists habit kills it; when love does
not exist habit calls it into being.' This is profoundly true, and for
every passion habit has killed it must certainly have created more
genuine affections.

The Spartan plan of allowing husband and wife to meet only by stealth
shows an acute understanding of human nature and has much to recommend
it, if the object in view is to prolong the period of passion. But we
are not now dealing with passion, but with the ordinary affection
between people who have to live together under the trying conditions of
modern marriage, and in these circumstances one must agree with Dumas as
to the wonders worked by habit.

Indeed, if people only realised it, habit is the cement which holds the
edifice of matrimony together. With the passing of years, given the
slightest basis of mutual harmony, one's partner becomes
indispensable--not by reason of her charms or the love we bear him, but
simply because she or he is a part of our lives. That is why I think the
policy of constant separation foolish. It is based presumably on the
erroneous supposition that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Where
the basis of mutual harmony does _not_ exist, it may be true; and if a
couple dislike each other and get on badly, a short separation may serve
to relieve the tension, and to send them back each resolved to try and
make things smoother in future. But where affection exists, it is a
mistake. One learns to do without the other; that linking chain of
little daily intimacies, oft-repeated jests, endearing customs, is
temporarily snapped, and it is not easily put together again. My friend
Miran