“But then,” said Father Soledano, “you have never done as you were told.”
Serge laughed and took his leave.
[XXX
FREDERIC IN THE TOILS]
| O, you shall have him give a number of those false facesere he depart. | ||
| EVERY MAN OUT OF HIS HUMOUR. | ||
SUPERSTITION will have it that marriage is a good thing, and, being one of the most powerful agents in human affairs, forbids discussion of its pseudo-axiom. Superstition uses marriage as a club with which to lay men and women low. Sincerity insists on examining marriage, and discovers that there is no such thing, as superstition interprets it. Society does not marry people, neither does the Church. Society and Church can only record what they are told. Men and women marry themselves by as much free will as they possess, and their marriage will be good or bad or both in the degree in which they are good or bad or both. If their marriage is good it will endure. If it is bad it will come to an end and it will none the less be at an end though superstition insist that the parties to it continue miserably to dwell under one roof and never seek outside it the love they have suffered to escape. Superstition refuses to countenance divorce—a dissolution of the bond as free as the making of it—and smiles blandly upon every hideous captivity so long as it comes not to public knowledge. . . Superstitious persons are perpetually setting their faces against Nature’s subtle and ingenious provisions for every emergency, but, it is to be observed, that if you set your face against anything in Nature, it will simply go round the other way and hit you in the back of the neck, exactly at the moment when you are congratulating yourself on having made a comfortable provision for the mature years of your life and a ripe and venerable old age.
They were very superstitious persons who lived near Frederic and Jessie Folyat, and they smiled benignantly upon their young marriage. Every morning several old ladies and more than one old gentleman peeped out of their dining-room windows to see Jessie walk down the garden on Frederic’s arm and kiss him at the little iron gate.
“Ah!” they said, “young love! Young love! There is nothing like it.”
And this in the face of their own appalling experience and the fact that Frederic and Jessie were neither of them very young: but superstitious persons realise very little of all that happens to them and they see even less of what is presented to their eyes. It was enough for these people that Jessie and Frederic were newly married, and they kept them in their minds as newly married long after they had settled down and the exciting novelty had given way to day-to-day habit.