aning of physical attraction.
2. Diverging tastes.
3. Being too much together.
4. Being too much apart. (There is no pleasing this institution.)
5. The sense of mutual property.
6. The sense of the irremediable.
7. Children.
8. The cost of living.
9. Rivalry.
10. Polygamy in men and "second blooming" in women.
11. Coarseness and talkativeness.
12. Sulkiness.
13. Dull lives.
14. Petty intolerance.
15. Stupidity.
16. Humour and aggressiveness.

There are other influences, but they are not easily ascertained;
sometimes they are subtle.

M 28 said to me: "My husband's grievance against me is that I have a
cook who can't cook; my grievance against him is that he married me."

Indeed, sentiment and the scullery painfully represent the divergence of
the two sexes. One should not exaggerate the scullery; the philosopher
who said "Feed the brute" was not entirely wrong, but it is quite easy
for a woman to ignore the emotional pabulum that many a man requires. It
is quite true that "the lover in the husband may be lost", but very few
women realize that the wife can blot out the mistress. Case M 19
confessed that she always wore out her old clothes at home, and she was
surprised when I suggested that though her husband was no critic of
clothes, he might often wonder why she did not look as well as other
women. Many modern wives know this; in them the desire to please never
quite dies; between lovers, it is violent and continuous; between
husband and wife, it is sometimes maintained only by shame and
self-respect: there are old slippers that one can't wear, even before
one's husband.

The problem arises very early with the waning of physical attraction. I
am not thinking only of the bad and hasty marriages so frequent in young
America, but of the English marriages, where both parties come together
in a state of sentimental excitement born of ignorance and rather
puritanical restraint. Europeans wed less wisely than the Hindoo and
the Turk, for these realize their wives as Woman. Generally they have
never seen a woman of their own class, and so she is a revelation, she
is indeed the bulbul, while he, being the first, is the King of men. But
the Europeans have mixed too freely, they have skimmed, they have
flirted, they have been so ashamed of true emotion that they have made
the Song of Solomon into a vaudeville ditty. They have watered the wine
of life.

So when at last the wine of life i