aside as soon as passion has gone, seems to me very cheap and shoddy, very
unworthy of human beings. Marriage should be all that--shall I say?--the
Brownings made of it. But when it is not, there is still often much that is
left. Men and women, you cannot enter into one another's lives in this deep
and intimate way and go on your way as though nothing had happened. You
cannot tear asunder people so united without bleeding. You cannot make a
failure of it without immeasurable loss.

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight."

Who that has once heard this can easily take anything less? Or who, having
loved in any of these ways, will lightly break the bond? I think that one
of the most profoundly moral relationships I have ever met between a
man and a woman was, in spite of all that I have said up till now, the
relationship of a man to a woman to whom at first he was not legally
married. It was her wish, not his, but they were not legally married. They
had no children, and she was unfaithful to him more than once, and yet this
man--and he did not call himself a Christian--this man felt that he had
taken the responsibility of that woman's life, and though he could easily
have put her away, and though, at last, she killed in him all that you
would normally call love between a man and woman, and he learned to care
for another woman, yet he would not abandon her because now she had grown
to need him, and he felt he could not take so great a human responsibility
as the life of another person and then cast it away as though it had never
been. That is morality. To such a sense of what human relationships demand
my whole soul gives homage. That seems to me a perfectly humane and,
therefore, truly moral idea of what love involves. Such a sense of
responsibility should go with all love. Passion cannot last, in the nature
of things, and, therefore, those who marry do so, if they know anything
at all of love--and, God help them, many of them do not--but if they know
anything at all of love, they know that it is physically impossible for
this particular bond always to unite them. They must be aware that there
is something more than that, something that must in the end transcend that
physical union.

Looking at