is the law: _Love, as a means for the perpetuation and
development of the human type, is very crude and open to improvement.
What the intellect of man has done with the beast, the intellect of man
may do with man_.

It is a truism to say that my intellect is wiser than my emotions. So,
knowing the precise value and use of this erotic phenomenon, this sexual
madness, this love, I, for one, elect to choose my mate with my
intellect. Thus I choose Hester. And I do truly love her, but in the
intellectual sense and not the sense you fanatically demand. I am not
seized with a loutish vertigo when I look upon her and touch her hand.
Nor do I feel impelled to leave her presence if I would live, as did
Dante the presence of Beatrice; nor the painful confusion of Rousseau,
when, in the same room with Madame Goton, he seemed impelled to leap
into the flaming fireplace. But I do feel for Hester what happily mated
men and women, after they have lived down the passion, feel in the
afternoon of life. It is the affection of man for woman, which is
sanity. It is the sanity of intercourse which replaces love madness; the
sanity which comes upon sparrows after the ardour of mating, when they
leave off wrangling and chattering and set soberly to work to build
their nest for the coming brood.

Pre-nuptial love is the madness of non-understanding and
part-understanding. Post-nuptial affection is the sanity of complete
understanding; it is based upon reason and service and healthy
sacrifice. The first is a blind mating of the blind; the second, a clear
and open-eyed union of male and female who find enough in common to
warrant that union. In a word and in the fullest sense of the word, it
is sex comradeship. Pre-nuptial love cannot survive marriage any
considerable time. It is doomed inexorably to flicker out, and when it
has flickered out it must be replaced by affection, or else the parties
to it must separate. We well know that many men and women, unable to
build up affection on the ruins of love, do separate, or if they do not,
continue to live together in cold tolerance or bitter hatred.

Now, Hester is my mate. We have much in common. There is intellectual,
spiritual, and physical affinity. The caress of her voice and the feel
of her mind are pleasurable to me; likewise the touch of her hand (and
you know that in the union of man and woman the higher affinities are
not possible unless there first be physiological affinity). We shall g