And the why not becomes because I do on the morrow, and the man and woman become husband and wife; and almost without agitation, without accident, they reach in safety the port of sure and tranquil happiness.
I recall two such marriages with emotion, those of Stuart Mill and Hillebrandt.
To these serene and tranquil unions children are not necessary, but if they come they brighten and bless the house, bringing with them a nosegay of flowers and an odour of spring which makes those two happy mortals young once more.
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Two old people.
Add some ten years to the arithmetical combination just studied and you will have a lower temperature, but still less danger to the happiness of the two beings who, defying ridicule and prejudice, wish to consecrate an old friendship upon the altar of matrimony.
I do not say altar as a matter of phraseology, nor to do homage to the religious ceremony of marriage, but because I am deeply convinced that if there be nothing beyond the union of bodies or association of capital marriage is a sacrilege. The troth of two should always be plighted on an altar, whether it be that of Christ or of some ideal, of Moses or Mahomet, of poetry or religion.
Old people only marry once, either to win legitimacy for an old contraband love, or to give a legal status to the children. They are marriages of reparation, corrections of proof-sheets set aside for many years and forgotten. They merit our approbation and belong to those good actions of which Christ speaks, which, if done at the last hour, make death less hard and allow us to die at peace and at rest with the faith, which illuminates our souls and prepares us to start in the train that bears us to eternal silence, or to the golden gates of the Christian paradise.
In the marriage of two old people who love each other, love is no intoxicating flower, but a friendship slightly gilded by sexual sympathy, which endures longer than the reproductive function even as it precedes it.
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