er its teething torments, can walk, feed itself,
and generally be companionable, is a prospect before which modern
mothers seem to quail. The remedy is to multiply the number of hopes
before the nursery has time to be outgrown by Hope No. 1, in fact to
keep the nursery going a good many years longer than is nowadays
fashionable--though by no means for the unlimited period advised by
Father Vaughan and other celibate priests entirely ignorant of nurseries
and their exigences!

III

PARENTHOOD: THE HIGHEST DESTINY

'O happy husband! happy wife!
The rarest blessing Heaven drops down
The sweetest treasure in spring's crown,
Starts in the furrow of your life.'
--GERALD MASSEY.

Perhaps I may be accused of dealing with marriage in a too flippant
manner. Most of the treatises that I have read have erred in the
opposite direction and have treated the subject from a tediously
transcendental point of view. I have purposely tried to deal with
realities, with facts, with matrimony as it really is--I mean as it
really appears to me--in this very workaday world, and not as it might
be in a glorious ideal world of noble spirits.

In truth, marriage, as it is carried out by the large majority does not
seem to me to possess much of a sacred element. What is there holy in
the fact of two human beings agreeing to live together to suit their own
convenience, for purely social and domestic reasons, and very often with
a strong commercial motive? There is, of course, a certain sanctity
about all love, but, of the various kinds of human love, the sexual
variety seems the least holy in itself. Family love, where the tie of
blood exists, the love between friends--purest of all affections--is
often more essentially sacred than the so-called holy love between
husband and wife. Marriage, the mere social and physical union of men
and women, _apart from parenthood_, is simply a partnership--resulting,
if you like, in an enormous increase of happiness and good to the
contracting parties--essentially an excellent contract, but a mere
mundane contract for all that. But when the children come, when the
divine and wonderful miracle is accomplished, then, indeed, is marriage
placed on a wholly different basis, and in dealing with it, I willingly
take my shoes from off my feet, for it is holy ground.

On the birth of a child the union that produced it acquires an immortal
significance. Formerly of importance only to the two