Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the intenser
and subtler perceptions of modern life, press more and more heavily
upon a marriage tie whose fashion comes from an earlier and less
discriminating time. When the wife was her husband's subordinate,
meeting him simply and uncritically for simple ends, when marriage
was a purely domestic relationship, leaving thought and the vivid
things of life almost entirely to the unencumbered man, mental and
temperamental incompatibilities mattered comparatively little. But
now the wife, and particularly the loving childless wife,
unpremeditatedly makes a relentless demand for a complete
association, and the husband exacts unthought of delicacies of
understanding and co-operation. These are stupendous demands.
People not only think more fully and elaborately about life than
they ever did before, but marriage obliges us to make that ever more
accidented progress a three-legged race of carelessly assorted
couples. . . .

Our very mental texture was different. I was rough-minded, to use
the phrase of William James, primary and intuitive and illogical;
she was tender-minded, logical, refined and secondary. She was
loyal to pledge and persons, sentimental and faithful; I am loyal to
ideas and instincts, emotional and scheming. My imagination moves
in broad gestures; her's was delicate with a real dread of
extravagance. My quality is sensuous and ruled by warm impulses;
hers was discriminating and essentially inhibitory. I like the
facts of the case and to mention everything; I like naked bodies and
the jolly smells of things. She abounded in reservations, in
circumlocutions and evasions, in keenly appreciated secondary
points. Perhaps the reader knows that Tintoretto in the National
Gallery, the Origin of the Milky Way. It is an admirable test of