ther. "It is an awkward thing to play with souls,"--you
override the fastidiousness of the soul in marrying your companion.
Unless you are an automaton, you cannot rest happy in the fact that you
and she do not disagree. For comfort's sake you would have a negative
dimension to your cosmos, forgetting that your longings and your needs
and, it may be, your dreams, are positive. If sex-comradeship and
affection were not as accidental and as dependent on mood as love
itself, your position would have much in its favour. You could then
arrange for compatibility in marriage.

You speak of the methods in economics that conserve energy and capital,
such as the employ of the machine-guiding boy, which saves the labour
power of a hundred men, and you hold that in the realm of personal life
like methods may obtain with value and dignity. I can see how natural it
has become for you to take this viewpoint. One can be a zealot in
matters frigid. The law behind the fact has you in its coil, and your
passion goes to ice. You burn for that cold thing, compatibility. You,
too, are in the market-place bound to a stake--it is not for such as you
to escape the fire. If you look to compatibility and want it intensely,
as others want love, then you suffer, and from your standpoint (not
mine) you raise a vain cry; for compatibility, like everything else, is
illusory. The illusions of love are a strength, and the ways of love are
divine; through them we come to that feeling of completion which is
compatibility and which is as ineffable as the white-lipped promise of
waves heard by those who have also listened to weeping. Love is not
responsible for institutionalism. There would be no fewer marriages if
people married for convenience, nor would the law make such unions less
binding. It is not the fault of love that the great social paradox
exists. In the precipitancy of feeling, you say, the lover fastens upon
an unsuitable mate, and, with possession, love dies. Here I attack your
facts. If an awakening comes, it is not for either of these reasons.
Love is not essentially rational, but then it is love. There is some
consistency in affairs natural, and the esoteric draught that enchanted
at one time cannot poison at another.

Love is not essentially rational, and it will not of a sudden become so
at the possession of the loved one. People who marry from convenience
may wake to find their union most inconvenient. "There are more things
in heaven