Cosmos."
Marriage, to be successful, is based on a graceful recession of the ego
in the cosmos of each of the partners. The prime difficulty is this;
people do not like to recede the ego. And the worst offenders are the
ones who are determined to stand up for the right, which usually is a
disguised way of naming their desire.

One might speak of a thousand and one things that every man and every
woman knows. One might speak of the death of love and the growth of
irritation, the disappearance of sympathy,--these are the hopeless
situations. But far more common and important, though less tragic, is
the disappearance of the little attentions, the little love-making, the
disappearance of good manners. Men are not the only or the worst
offenders in this; the nervous housewife is very apt to be the scold
and the nag. Perhaps the neurasthenia of the husband arises from his
revolt against the incessant demands of his wife, but that's another
story.

At any rate, there is what seems to be a cardinal point of difference
between men and women, perhaps arising from some essential difference in
make-up, perhaps in part due to difference in training. An essential
need of the average American-trained woman is sympathy, constantly
expressed, constantly manifested. The average man tends to become
matter-of-fact, the average woman finds in matter-of-factness the death
of love. She acts as if she believed that the little acts of love and
sympathy are the more important as manifesting the real state of
feeling, that the major duties were of less importance.

On this point most men and women never seem to agree. The man gets
impatient over the constant demand for his attention. He thinks it
unreasonable and childish. Intent upon his own struggle he is apt to
think her affairs are minor matters. He thinks his wife makes mountains
out of molehills and lacks a sense of proportion. He forgets that the
devotion of the husband is the woman's anchor to windward, her grip on
safety,--that his success and struggle are hers only in so far as he and
she are intimate and lover-like. And women, even those who trust their
husbands absolutely so far as physical loyalty goes, jealously watch
them for the appearance of boredom, or lack of interest, for the falling
off of the lover's spirit and feeling.

After marriage the rivalry of men expresses itself in business more than
in love. Even where a woman does not fear another woman as a rival she
fears