"Of course it must, to a large extent; and, to meet the requirements of the age, women are now allowed to marry where they fancy, and not where they are commanded. Yet, as one looks around at the marriages one knows," continued Percivale, "there is a sameness about matrimony."
"Just so," broke in Claud, eagerly. "Because, as we look round, we see only the outside life. There is a sameness about the houses in London streets; but strip away the wall, and what a difference you will find in each! I will find you points of likeness between Rome and Manchester. Both are cities, both have houses, streets, shops, churches, passers-by, palaces, hovels. So with Jones and Smith. Both are married, both have servants, children, houses, bills, all the usual attributes of marriage. Yet you might bet with certainty that the general atmosphere of Jones' life is no more like Smith's than the air of Rome resembles the air of Manchester. It makes me quite angry," went on the young man, with heat, "to hear fools say with a smile of some young bridegroom, 'He thinks his marriage is going to turn out a different affair from anyone else's.' If he does think so, he is perfectly right. It will be different. He will have an experience all his own; but it will give him no right at all to generalize afterwards on the advantages or disadvantages of marriage in the abstract—there is no such thing as marriage in the abstract!"
"You take it to heart," said Percivale, smiling at his earnestness.
"I do. Such balderdash is talked now-a-days about it. As if you could make a code of regulations to suit everyone—the infinitely varying temperaments of nineteenth-century English people!"
"Yet we find one code of laws, broadly speaking, enough to govern all these infinite varieties."
"Precisely! Their outer lives. But happiness in marriage does seem to me to be such a purely esoteric thing. 'It's folly,' says some one, 'to marry on a small income.' I hold that no one has the least right to lay down any such thing as a general proposition. It may be the height of folly—it may be the most sensible thing in the world. Nobody can pronounce, unless they know both the parties who contemplate the step. It seems to me that, granted only the right man and woman come together, the spring of happiness is from within. I can believe in an ideal marriage—I can fancy starvation with one woman preferable to a stalled ox with any other; but it must be one woman"—again that most unwonted softness in his eyes—"a woman who shall never disappoint me, though she might sometimes vex me; who shall be as faulty as she pleases, but never base; and then—then—'I'll give up my heart to my lady's keeping,' indeed, and the stars shall fall and the angels be weeping ere I cease to love her:—a woman, mind you, an imperfect, one-sided, human thing like myself!—no abstraction, but just what I wanted to complete me—the rest of me, as it were, placed by God in the world, for me to seek out and find."
There was a complete silence in the room after this outburst. Claud, half-ashamed of his spontaneous Irish burst of sentiment, stared into the fire assiduously. Percivale's hand was over his eyes. At last he said,
"You and I think much alike; and yet——"
"Yet?"
"You want to bring your love out into the broad daylight of common life; you want to yoke her with yourself, to bear half the burden. For me, I think I would place mine above—I would stand always between her and the daily fret—she should be to me what Beatrice was to Dante: the vision of all perfection."