And the first time that emotional flood tide is experienced is nothing to what later psychosomatic communion may attain. Man and wife looking back on their honeymoon thirty years before realize poignantly how infinitely more exalted and overwhelming is their present-day love communion than were the unsteady, brief and trembling, uncoördinated embraces of their early married life. True, they looked at each other with eyes of love long years before, but such simple, ignorant, artless infantile eyes, that looked without seeing half there was to see. They have learned each other as they never could have learned any two, much less three or more, of the other sex. Each has learned how to give, and that riches consist only in power to give, and that power to give is developed only by giving, just as skill in swimming comes from swimming and not from standing on the shore.
So they immerge each day into the invigorating ocean, and glory in the rise and fall of its surf, in its colour and in its refreshing coolness; and when they become too old to swim, they will sit by the open fire and exchange sweet reminiscences of bygone plunges, until their spirits together breast the waves of infinity and eternity forever.
§ 77
One of the factors of the general marital muddle that constitutes most marriages is the ignorance of husband or wife, or both, about whether their sex life, if they still continue it, is normal. What are the evidences that the consummation of marital life has taken place as satisfactorily as could be wished, or as could occur with the pair in question, or (as is supposed at any rate) takes place with the newly married lovers on their honeymoon?
It is not enough merely to be able to say they are happy, for they will sometimes say so whether they know they are or not, and they will in some cases not know. In fact few people in or out of the wedded state know whether they are truly happy or not or how to become happy if they are not so.
If a husband and wife are happy together they will have begun to make their marital life a love drama, by the frequent enactment of the love episode as described in these pages and their outlook upon life will be buoyant and positive.
§ 78
In The Secret Places of the Heart, H. G. Wells has plainly indicated that the love episode has taken place between Sir Richmond Hardy and Miss Grammont. He writes only of the calm which follows the emotional storm, and in these words (p. 253):
“At the breakfast table it was Belinda (Miss Grammont’s companion) who was the most nervous of the three, the most moved, the most disposed to throw a sacramental air over their last meal together. Her companions had passed beyond the idea of separation; it was as if they now cherished a secret satisfaction at the high dignity of their parting. Belinda in some way perceived they had become different. They were no longer tremulous lovers. They seemed sure of one another and with a new pride in their bearing.”