"That was a little aside, Alice, made to my other self, my
metaphysical man,--not meant at all for my audience. I was meditating
a lecture on the causes of conjugal happiness, but I seem to have
stumbled upon a knot in the very first unwinding of the thread of my
discourse."

"I'll listen to the lecture, Uncle, though I see but one simple and
all-sufficient cause for my happiness."

"That Herbert loves you, ha? Know, my pretty neophyte, that happiness,
married happiness especially, does not come from being loved, but from
loving. What says our Coleridge?


"'For still the source, not fountain, gives
The daily food on which Love lives.'


"And he is right, although you shake your curls. In most marriages, in
all that are not matters of convenience, one party has a stronger
heart, will, character, than the other. And that one loves the most
from the very necessity of his nature, and, loving most, is the
happier. The other falls, after a while, into a passive state, becomes
the mere recipient of love, and finds his or her happiness in
something else, or perhaps does not find it at all."

"Neither side would satisfy me, Uncle John; I hardly know which fate
would be the more terrible. Do you think I would accept such a
compromise in exchange for all I am living and feeling now? I would
rather be miserable at once than so half-happy."