ts current from above;
And earth a second Eden shows,
Where'er the healing water flows.

Some of the specifically romantic ingredients of love, on the other
hand--adoration, hyperbole, the mixed moods of hope and despair--do
not normally enter into conjugal affection. No one would fail to see
the absurdity of a husband's exclaiming

O that I were a glove upon that hand
That I might touch that cheek.

He _may_ touch that cheek, and kiss it too--and that makes a
tremendous difference in the tone and tension of his feelings. Unlike
the lover, the husband does not think, feel, and speak in perpetual
hyperboles. He does not use expressions like "beautiful tyrant, fiend
angelical," or speak of

The cruel madness of love
The honey of poisonous flowers.

There is no madness or cruelty in conjugal love: in its normal state
it is all peace, contentment, happiness, while romantic love, in its
normal state, is chiefly unrest, doubt, fear, anxiety, torture and
anguish of heart--with alternating hours of frantic elation--until the
Yes has been spoken.

The emotions of a husband are those of a mariner who has entered into
the calm harbor of matrimony with his treasure safe and sound, while
the romantic lover is as one who is still on the high seas of
uncertainty, storm-tossed one moment, lifted sky-high on a wave of
hope, the next in a dark abyss of despair. It is indeed lucky that
conjugal affection does differ so widely from romantic love; such
nervous tension, doubt, worry, and constant friction between hope and
despair would, if continued after marriage, make life a burden to the
most loving couples.

WHY SAVAGES VALUE WIVES

The notion that genuine romantic love does not undergo a metamorphosis
in marriage is the first of five mistakes I have undertaken to correct
in this chapter. The second is summed up in Westermarck's assertion
(359-60) that it is

"impossible to believe that there ever was a time when
conjugal affection was entirely wanting in the human race
... it seems, in its most primitive form, to have been as
old as marriage itself. It must be a certain degree of
affection that induces the male to defend the female during
her period of pregnancy."

Now I concede that natural selection must have developed at an early
period in the history of man, as in the lower animals, some kind of an
_attachment_ between male and females. A wife could not se