u to do what George Eliot did greatly to her advantage,"
he answered reproachfully.

"You asked me to do what Georges Sand did greatly to her detriment,"
Beth said. "George Eliot is an after-thought. And you certainly have
no intention of asking me to do what she did, for she acted openly,
she deceived no one, and injured no one."

"And you do not blame her?" he exclaimed with a flash of hope.

Beth answered indirectly: "When I think about that, I ask myself have
Church and State arranged the relations of the sexes successfully
enough to convince us that they cannot be better arranged? Are
marriages holier now than they were in the days when there were no
churches to bless them? or happier here than in other countries where
they are simple private contracts? And it seems to me that we have no
historical proof that the legal bond is necessarily the holiest
between man and woman, or that there is never justification for a more
irregular compact. I know that 'holy matrimony' is often a state of
absolute degradation, especially for the woman; and I believe that two
honourable people can live together honourably without the
conventional bond, so long as no one else is injured, no previous
compact broken. But all the same I think the legal bond is best. It is
a safeguard to the family and a restraint on the unprincipled. And, at
any rate, all my experience, all my thought, all my hope argue for the
dignity of permanence in human relations. Anything else is bad for the
individual, for the family, for the state. As civilisation, as
evolution advances from lower to higher, we find it makes more and
more for monogamy. Our highest types of men and women are monogamous.
Those whose contracts are lightly made and lightly broken are trivial
people. That useful Oneida Creek experiment proved that the instinct,
if not the ideal, of modern humanity is monogamous."

"What was that?" he asked.

"A number of people formed a community at Oneida Creek to live
together in a kind of ordered promiscuity, but the experiment failed
because it was found eventually that the members were living together
secretly in pairs. No. The more I know of life the less I like the
idea of allowing any laxity in the marriage relation. In certain cases
of course there is good and sufficient reason for two people to
separate. But I believe that right-minded people can generally, and
almost always do, make their marriages answer. Marriage is compact of
every