ou do not know that they give place to the steadier joys of the
unknown, that after the promise comes the fulfilment, that the hope is
not more beautiful than the realisation, that there is divinity in both,
and that love does not disappoint.

Tell me, are the placid marriages of affection you are preparing to
describe so very placid? Do these jog along so well? Is the control,
restraint, forbearance, sacrifice, of which you speak, as readily
practised for the person who is that to you which twenty others may
quite as easily be, as it is for the one beyond all whom you love and
deify, whom the laws of your being command that you serve, living and
dying? God knows, the average marriage does not exhibit a striking
picture of the practice of these virtues! Rather are such phrases ideals
on stilts on which suffering marital partners attempt to hobble across
their extremity. On the other hand, to some extent everybody practises
restraint and sacrifice since everybody is to some extent moral. But it
goes very hard with your average man and woman in your average marriage,
and there is a decided setting of the mouth and narrowing of the eyes
with the effort.

Whatever placidity there is is attained by means of vampirism. Diderot,
the husband of a stupid seamstress, had no right to the love of a Mlle.
Voland. It was vampirism and sin to take all from this woman, and to
return her favour with so much less than all, as surely as cowardice and
selfishness are sin. But the illicit relation will exist because custom
cannot rid men and women of subtle sympathies and dear yearnings,
because men and women will love though the world consider it cheap and
mad. Individually, we have no difficulty in finding our happiness, but
we are made advance toward it through the twisted byways of an unfrank
world. "No straight road! Keep turning!" has been the scream of
convention since convention began.

So for every commonplace marriage there is a canonised love, and the
story is told in the old Greek civilisation by the Hetairae. You remember
how it reads in the history: "The low position generally assigned the
wife in the home had a most disastrous effect upon Greek morals. She
could exert no such elevating or refining influence as she casts over
the modern home. The men were led to seek social and intellectual
sympathy and companionship outside the family circle, among a class of
women known as Hetairae, who were esteemed chiefly for their bril