In that monstrous pairing of the deer with the tortoise, the horse with the ox, the swallow with the goose, only locomotion is treated of; but for the race that a man and a woman must take through life it is a matter not only of velocity, but of environment and measure; of all that can modify senses, sentiments, and thoughts. To find a comparison which at all suits or pictures truthfully the tortures of two badly matched individuals who must live together, I can only take that of a fish and a bird condemned to live together. But this comparison is not even good, for either the fish or the bird would die surely and quickly, but of the man or woman neither dies, but live a death in life, feeling nothing of life but disgust, pain, and wrong.
Convicts also are paired with a chain without any regard to their sympathies, but they have at least the psychical relationship of crime, and often vice, which brings them near each other, and also that other common hope of escape that makes them allies and even brethren; but in that other galley of a badly assorted marriage there is not one chain alone, but a hundred and a thousand, all invisible, with as many nerves connecting two existences condemned to the sad communion of a common torture which is doubled for each by the suffering of the other.
There is the chain of the heart, the chains of taste and sympathy, the chains of antipathy, habits, desires, and regrets; and along the length of these chains there run currents of spite, hatred, rancour, malediction, vengeance, and retaliation.
The slightest movement on one side is communicated to the other by the chains, and makes that other feel his pain, which he returns doubled by its own force and rendered crueller by the desire of revenge. So each wrong has an echo, and the echo is doubled and increased a hundredfold, until the whole life becomes a torment, as if every nerve had tetanus, and every organ of body and soul was transformed into a tooth suffering spasms of pain. When a long-forgotten wound is cicatrised, and a rougher movement than usual re-opens the wound anew, in that martyred frame there is not a member which does not suffer nor a single feeling that is not pain.
This is the meaning of incompatibility of character, which has been adjudged with reason by legislators as a sufficient cause for divorce, and it is, and ought to be, more so than impotence, bad treatment, or any other cause of separation.
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This want of harmony in sentiment has only too many and too varied forms, but at the foundation there is always this skeleton:
That which I like you dislike; that which makes you happy makes me suffer.
Woman is an ermine, who allows herself to be killed rather than cross a field of snow soiled by mud.