CHAPTER VI
RAMBLES ABOUT MATRIMONY—III
To marry a beautiful woman for the mere love of her beauty is to undertake to dwell in a country that has a temperature of 100 in the shade without being provided with clothes that will enable you to stand a winter of 50 below zero when it comes.
In the relations between men and women it is, after all, beauty that makes woman particularly attractive to man. For this reason, the love of a man is more sensual, more jealous, than that of a woman, which is more affectionate, more confiding, and more faithful. As a rule, the passion of a husband goes on diminishing as that of his wife goes on increasing. A man exacts of his wife her first love; a woman exacts of her husband his last. Only the select few can manage their matrimonial affairs with such clever diplomacy as to make these different elements of happiness and sources of danger work together with success.
Married people would live more happily together if they could now and then forget that they are tied together for life. Any little scene that may help them to forget it should be enacted by them.
Happiness in matrimony is more solid when it is founded on friendship through thick and thin than when it is merely on love.