I leave it to historians to decide; but every practical problem of happiness has its rubicon, at which the whole world pauses.
Some turn back.
Some leap over it.
The most of them remain still on the bank all their lives, looking at the other side and scratching their heads. After forty years of age bachelors or widows stand before the rubicon of marriage and say:
Shall I go over or not?
The larger number wait so long to decide that the forty years become fifty and then sixty. The limbs become weaker and the river grows wider by the inundations and floods of so many autumns, and thus the problem is resolved by want of resolution.
Others instead, after a short and earnest meditation, exclaim:
No, I will not leap it.
And both do well, because although the calculation of probabilities is rarely applicable to moral problems, yet it proves that the combination of an old man and a young woman is a very frail one; at the least shock it is separated, as with fulminant mercury, chloride of azote, and all the infinite array of explosives; then comes a detonation, a disaster, more often a putrid and fetid dissolution.