is what
romantic love must evolve into after marriage. But do not mistake me,
Dane. I do not intend this sweepingly. It will not do for the whole
human herd; for at once enters that abhorrent thing you rightly fear,
the marriage for convenience. Alas, it too often masquerades under the
guise of romantic love. Certainly, every man is not capable of taking
this short cut and at the same time of avoiding a violation of true
sexual selection. Having little brain, the average man can only act in
line with sexual selection by undergoing the romantic love malady. But
for some few of us, and I dare to include myself, the short cut is
permissible. This short cut I shall take, and far be it from any worldly
sense of stocks and bonds and comfortable housekeeping.

Marriage means less to man than to woman? Yes, by all means, at least to
the normal man or woman. As surely as reproduction is woman's peculiar
function, and nutrition man's, just so surely does marriage sum up more
to woman than to man. It becomes the whole life of the woman, while to
the man it is rather an episode, rather a mere side to his many-sided
life. Natural selection has made it so. The countless men of the past,
even from before the time they swung down out of the trees, who devoted
more time and energy to their love-affairs than to the winning of food
and shelter, died from innutrition in various ways. Only the men, normal
men, with a proper respect for the mechanism of life, survived and
perpetuated their kind. The chance was large that the abnormal lover did
not win a wife at all. At least it is so to-day. The abnormal lover is
not a successful bidder for women, and is usually passed by.

But while we are on this topic, do not let us forget Dante Alighieri,
your prince of lovers. Has a suitable explanation ever occurred to you
concerning how he came to marry Gemma, daughter of Manetto Donati, who
bore him seven children, and was never once mentioned in the "Divina
Commedia?" You remember what he said of his first meeting with Beatrice,
"At that moment I saw most truly that the spirit of life which hath its
dwelling in the secretest chambers of the heart began to tremble so
violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith." And he
later had seven children by Gemma, daughter of Manetto Donati, and whom,
as the historian has recorded, "there was no reason to suppose other
than a good wife."

As for the primitive, I hark back to it because we are