an, married again, continued his friendship
with his former wife and later, when a baby came to the couple, the
ex-wife and mutual friend was the attending physician.

The old idea of matrimony held that the husband and wife must be
"yoked" together, so that neither one could exercise any individual
predilection or choice of friends, or recreation, or taste or desire.
And this is still the average idea of a successful marriage. It is an
idea that is not confined to the ignorant, and the narrow-minded. It
is the attitude of society at large, though upon what argument such an
idea is based, must be left to the perverted imagination.

Presumably it is because of that colossal egotism which insists upon
personal ownership. One would expect this tendency to own each other
to have died with the death of the institution of slavery, but it
still exists, and as we have already observed, among those who sit in
the seats of the mighty as well as among the ignorant.

A couple who had married on the ground of intellectual affinity lived
together most congenially for a period of twelve years, although they
agreed that sexual affinity was lacking in their relationship. They
agreed that there was another phase of mating, and that should either
come to the point where freedom was desirable, it would be given
without resentment or anger. They both decided, that perfect candor
and honesty with each other on this score was a higher type of
civilization than that which prevails where mutual deceit is the rule.

True to their compact, when the wife met the one whom she believed to
be the one man who answered the call of her soul, the husband gave her
up, retaining her friendship, and the memory of an intellectual
companionship unmarred by the horrors of dispute and deceit and
disruption. But he incurred the severest criticism from Society, which
is as yet composed of the animal-man, rather than the man-god, and the
animal-man (meaning woman as well) knows no higher code of morality
than that which he vaingloriously terms "defense of his honor." By
exactly what process of reasoning a man can imagine his honor defended
or appeased by shooting his rival, is, we admit, beyond our power to
fathom. But such is the basis of the unwritten law, in which civilized
man vents his remaining savagery.

Affinity-marriages, then, are not synonymous with soul-mating. And
while we contend that affinity marriages, based upon at least some
degree of mutual