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The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeannette Duncan
page 34 of 258 (13%)

'And what possesses you to imagine that in marrying Cecily I should
make a mess of it? Shouldn't your first consideration be whether
SHE would?'

'Perhaps it should, but, you see, it isn't. Cecily would be happy
with anybody who made her comfortable. You would ask a good deal
more than that, you know.'

Dacres, at this, took me up promptly. Life, he said, the heart of
life, had particularly little to say to temperament. By the heart
of life I suppose he meant married love. He explained that its
roots asked other sustenance, and that it throve best of all on
simple elemental goodness. So long as a man sought in women mere
casual companionship, perhaps the most exquisite thing to be
experienced was the stimulus of some spiritual feminine counterpart;
but when he desired of one woman that she should be always and
intimately with him, the background of his life, the mother of his
children, he was better advised to avoid nerves and sensibilities,
and try for the repose of the common--the uncommon--domestic
virtues. Ah, he said, they were sweet, like lavender. (Already, I
told him, he smelled the housekeeper's linen-chest.) But I did not
interrupt him much; I couldn't, he was too absorbed. To
temperamental pairing, he declared, the century owed its breed of
decadents. I asked him if he had ever really recognized one; and he
retorted that if he hadn't he didn't wish to make a beginning in his
own family. In a quarter of an hour he repudiated the theories of a
lifetime, a gratifying triumph for simple elemental goodness.
Having denied the value of the subtler pretensions to charm in woman
as you marry her, he went artlessly on to endow Cecily with as many
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