girls have used, quite
unconsciously sometimes, very consciously in some cases, the man's
undisciplined impulses for his own subjection. I need not recall
incidents that all among us must have witnessed. I do not wish to pass
any censure upon women. The sensualist within most of us is stronger
than we women admit, and the primitive fact forces us to take risks,
sending us headlong into a thousand dangers.

IV

Can we ever find perfect love? Is it not like exercise of the body? You
can develop it to a certain point, but not beyond without danger and
very slowly with continued patient work. Do we not need exercise of the
soul? I do not know. Often I feel I know nothing. To some men and women
it is all simple enough, a woman is just a woman and a man is a man. The
trouble begins when any woman becomes the one desired woman and any man
the one desired man.

There is gain and development in this selective tendency of Love--and
yet, if I am right, there is terrible danger lurking in the application
of this egoistic spiritual view.

It is, little as we may believe it, this search for personal spiritual
happiness that often so greatly endangers marriage. Searching always for
this perfect mate, we must find a partner corresponding in every respect
to our ideal. The man in Mr. Hardy's novel, "The Well Beloved," spent
forty years in trying to do this, and his ultimate failure is typical of
the experience of most of us. Fools and blind, we neither understand nor
seek the cause of our failure. We are like little lost dogs searching
for a master. We seek without ceasing some pilot passion to which we can
surrender our heavy burden of freedom. The dry-rot destruction of this
individualistic age has worm-eaten into marriage; we have sought to
drown pain and the exhaustion of our souls, to fill emptiness with
pleasure, to place the personal good in marriage above the racial duty,
to forget responsibility, to arrogate for the unimportant Self, and, in
so doing, inevitably we have turned away from essential things. Can't
you see that we are so terribly tired of this search for something that
we never find? Our adventures are the tricks of the child to cloud our
eyes to our own emptiness and pain.

V

_Marriage is not a religion to us: it is a sport._

I say this quite deliberately. I am sure we know better how to engage a
servant, how to buy a house, how to set up in business--how, indeed, to
do every unimportant thing in li