not often intermarry, and artists
and writers are more apt to choose each other than exponents of their
own cult.

[Sidenote: Appreciation and Accomplishment]

It is not surprising if a man who is passionately fond of music falls in
love with a woman who has a magnificent voice, or a power which amounts
to magic over the strings of her violin. Appreciation is as essential
to happiness as accomplishment, and when the two are balanced in
marriage, comradeship is inevitable. An artist may marry a woman who
does not understand his pictures, but if she had not appreciated him in
ways more vital to his happiness, there would have been no marriage.

It is pathetic to see what marriage sometimes is, compared with what it
might be--to see it degraded to the level of a business transaction when
it was meant to be infinitely above the sordid touch of the dollar and
the dime. It is a perverted instinct which leads one to marry for money,
for it will not buy happiness, though it may secure an imitation which
pleases some people for a little while.

There is nothing so beautiful as a girl's dream of her marriage, and
nothing so sad as the same girl, if Time brings her disillusion instead
of the true marriage which is "a mutual concord and agreement of souls,
a harmony in which discord is not even imagined; the uniting of two
mornings that hope to reach the night together."

The world is full of pain and danger for those who face it alone, and
home, that sanctuary where one may find strength and new courage, must
be built upon a foundation of mutual helpfulness and trust. No one can
make a home alone. It needs a man's strong hands, a woman's tender
hands, and two true hearts.

[Sidenote: The Light upon the Altar]

The light which shines upon the bridal altar is either the white flame
of eternal devotion or the sacrificial fire which preys hungrily upon
someone's disappointment and someone's broken heart. But to the utter
rout of the cynic, the dream which led the two souls thither sometimes
becomes divinely true.

Marriage is said to be sufficient "career" for any woman, and it is
equally true of men. Like Emerson's vision of friendship, it is fit "not
only for serene days and pleasant rambles, but for all the passages of
life and death."

It is to make one the stronger because one does not have to go alone. It
is to make one's joy the sweeter because it is shared. It is to take the
sting away from grief because it is divi