"Will the love you are so rich in
Light a fire in the kitchen,
And will the little God of Love turn the spit, spit, spit?"
Only the little God of Love does not call, and the butcher does.
It is her own fault. It is always one's own fault when one has illusions, though it is, in a way, one's privilege. She is attracted to a strange man because he is tall and beautiful, or short and ugly and has a clever head, or looks like a barber; he comes of different stock, from another country, out of another class—and these two strangers suddenly attempt to blend a total of, say, fifty-five years of different lives into a single one! Gold will melt, but it needs a very fierce fire, and as soon as the fire is withdrawn, it hardens again. Seldom is there anything to make it fluid once more, for the attraction, once primary, grows with habit commonplace, with contrast unsatisfactory, with growth unsuitable. The lovers are twenty, then in love, then old.
It is true that habit affects man not in the same way as it does woman; after conquest man seems to grow indifferent, while, curiously enough, habit often binds woman closer to man, breeds in her one single fierce desire: to make him love her more. Man buys cash down, woman on the instalment plan, horribly suspecting now and then that she is really buying on the hire system. A rather literary case, Case M 11, said to me: "I am much more in love with him than I was in the beginning; he seemed so strange and hard then. Now I love him, but ... he seems tired of me; he knows me too well. I wonder whether we only fall in love with men just about the time that they get sick of us."
Her surmise may be correct: there is no record of the after-life of Perseus and Andromeda, and it is more romantic not to delve into it. Neither they nor any other lovers could hope to maintain the early exaltations. I am reminded of a well-known picture by Mr. Charles Dana Gibson, showing two lovers in the snow by the sea. They are gazing into each other's eyes; below is written: "They began saying good-by last summer." Does any one doubt that a visit to the minister, say, in the autumn, might have altered the complexion of things? And no wonder, for they were the unknown, and through marriage would become the known. It is only the unknown that tempts, until one realizes that the unknown and the known are the same thing, as Socrates realized that life and death are the same thing, mere converses of a single proposition. It is the unknown makes strange associates, attracts men to ugly women, slatterns to dandies. It is not only contrast, it is the suspicion that the unexpected outside must conceal something. The breaking down of that concealment is conquest, and after marriage there is no conquest; there is only security: who could live dangerously in Brooklyn? Once licensed, love is official; its gifts are doled out as sugar by a grocer, and sometimes short weighed. Men suffer from this and many go dully wondering what it is they miss that once they had; they go rather heavy, rather dense, cumbrously gallant, asking to be understood, and whimpering about it in a way that would be ridiculous if it were not a little pathetic. Meanwhile, their wives wonder why all is not as it was. It is no use telling them that nothing can ever be as it was, that as mankind by living decays, the emotions and outlook must change; to have had a delight is a deadly thing, for one wants it again, just as it was, as a child demands always the same story. It must be the same delight, and none who feel emotion will ever understand that "the race of delights is short and pleasures have mutable faces."
It is true that early joys may unite, especially if one can believe that there is only one fountain of joy. I think of many cases,—M 5, M 33,—where there is only one cry: "It is cruel to have had delights, for the glamour of the past makes the day darker." They will live to see the past differently when they are older and the present matters less. But until then, the dead joy poisons the animate present; the man must drift away to his occupation, for there is nothing else, and the woman must harden by wanting what she cannot have. She will part herself from him more thoroughly by hardening, for one cannot count upon a woman's softness; it can swiftly be transmuted into malicious hatred.
3
This picture of pain is the rule where two strangers wed, but there are some who, taking a partner discover a friend, many who develop agreeable acquaintanceship. Passion may be diverted into a common interest, say in conchology; if people are not too stupid, not too egotistic, they very soon discover in each other a little of the human good will that will not die. They must, or they fail. For whereas in the beginning foolish lips may be kissed, a little later they must learn to speak some wisdom. In this men are most exacting; they are most inclined to demand that women should hold up to their faces the mirror of flattery, while women seem more tolerant, often because they do not understand, very often because they do not care, and echo the last words of Mr. Bernard Shaw's Ann: "Never mind her, dear, go on talking;" perhaps because they have had to tolerate so much in the centuries that they have grown expert. One may, however, tolerate whilst strongly disapproving, and one must disapprove when one's egotism is continually insulted by the other party's egotism. There is very little room for twice "I" in what ought to have been "We", and we nearly all feel that the axis of the earth passes through our bodies. So the common interests of two egotisms can alone make of these one egotism. The veriest trifle will serve, and pray do not smile at Case M 4, who forgive each other all wrongs when they find for dinner a risotto à la Milanaise. A slightly spasmodic interest, and one not to be compared with a common taste for golf, or motoring, or entertaining, but still it is not to be despised. It is so difficult to pick a double interest from the welter of things that people do alone; it is so difficult for wives truly to sympathize with games, business, politics, newspapers, inventions; most women hate all that. And it is still more difficult, just because man is man and master, for him really to care for the fashions, for gossip, for his wife's school friends, and especially her relations, for tea parties, tennis tournaments at the Rectory, lectures at the Mutual Improvement Association, servants' misdeeds, and growths in the garden. Most men hate all that. People hold amazing conversations:
She: "Do you know, dear, I saw Mrs. Johnson again to-day with that man."
He: (Trying hard) "Oh! yes, the actor fellow, you mean."