"Our experiences of matrimony with others have not been encouraging,

I own," said he with some gloom; "either owing to our own

dissatisfied, unpractical natures, or by our misfortune. But we

two--"

"Should be two dissatisfied ones linked together, which would be

twice as bad as before... I think I should begin to be afraid of

you, Jude, the moment you had contracted to cherish me under a

Government stamp, and I was licensed to be loved on the premises by

you--Ugh, how horrible and sordid! Although, as you are, free, I

trust you more than any other man in the world."

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"No, no--don't say I should change!" he expostulated; yet there was

misgiving in his own voice also.

"Apart from ourselves, and our unhappy peculiarities, it is foreign

to a man's nature to go on loving a person when he is told that

he must and shall be that person's lover. There would be a much

likelier chance of his doing it if he were told not to love. If the

marriage ceremony consisted in an oath and signed contract between

the parties to cease loving from that day forward, in consideration

of personal possession being given, and to avoid each other's society

as much as possible in public, there would be more loving couples

than there are now. Fancy the secret meetings between the perjuring

husband and wife, the denials of having seen each other, the

clambering in at bedroom windows, and the hiding in closets! There'd

be little cooling then."

"Yes; but admitting this, or something like it, to be true, you are

not the only one in the world to see it, dear little Sue. People go

on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many

of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a

month's pleasure with a life's discomfort. No doubt my father and

mother, and your father and mother, saw it, if they at all resembled

us in habits of observation. But then they went and married just the

same, because they had ordinary passions. But you, Sue, are such a

phantasmal, bodiless creature, one who--if you'll allow me to say

it--has so little animal passion in you, that you can act upon reason

in the matter, when we poor unfortunate wretches of grosser substance

can't."

"Well," she sighed, "you've owned that it would probably end in

misery for us. And I am not so exceptional a woman as you think.

Fewer women like marriage than you suppose, only they enter into it

for the dignity it is assumed to confer, and the social advantages

it gains them sometimes--a dignity and an advantage that I am quite

willing to do without."




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