the things we misunderstood in each other. I know a score of
couples who have married in that fashion.

Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the intenser and
subtler perceptions of modern life, press more and more heavily upon a
marriage tie whose fashion comes from an earlier and less discriminating
time. When the wife was her husband's subordinate, meeting him simply
and uncritically for simple ends, when marriage was a purely domestic
relationship, leaving thought and the vivid things of life
almost entirely to the unencumbered man, mental and temperamental
incompatibilities mattered comparatively little. But now the wife,
and particularly the loving childless wife, unpremeditatedly makes a
relentless demand for a complete association, and the husband exacts
unthought of delicacies of understanding and co-operation. These are
stupendous demands. People not only think more fully and elaborately
about life than they ever did before, but marriage obliges us to make
that ever more accidented progress a three-legged race of carelessly
assorted couples....

Our very mental texture was different. I was rough-minded, to use the
phrase of William James, primary and intuitive and illogical; she was
tender-minded, logical, refined and secondary. She was loyal to
pledge and persons, sentimental and faithful; I am loyal to ideas
and instincts, emotional and scheming. My imagination moves in broad
gestures; her's was delicate with a real dread of extravagance. My
quality is sensuous and ruled by warm impulses; hers was discriminating
and essentially inhibitory. I like the facts of the case and to mention
everything; I like naked bodies and the jolly smells of things. She
abounded in reservations, in circumlocutions and evasions, in keenly
appreciated secondary points. Perhaps the reader knows that Tintoretto
in the National Gallery, the Origin of the Milky Way. It is an admirable
test of temperamental quality. In spite of my early training I have
come to regard that picture as altogether delightful; to Margaret it
has always been "needlessly offensive." In that you have our fundamental
breach. She had a habit, by no means rare, of damning what she did not
like or find sympathetic in me on the score that it was not my "true
self," and she did not so much accept the universe as select from it and
do her best to ignore the rest. And also I had far more initiative than
had she. This is no catalogue of rights and wron