ce
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