her own sharpness of mind. What she most esteems in marriage, on
the psychic plane, is the chance it offers for the exercise of that
caressing irony which I have already described. She likes to observe
that her man is a fool--dear, perhaps, but none the less damned.
Her so-called love for him, even at its highest, is always somewhat
pitying and patronizing.




27.


The Charm of Mystery


Monogamous marriage, by its very conditions, tends to break down
this strangeness. It forces the two contracting parties into an
intimacy that is too persistent and unmitigated; they are in contact at
too many points, and too steadily. By and by all the mystery of the
relation is gone, and they stand in the unsexed position of brother
and sister. Thus that "maximum of temptation" of which Shaw
speaks has within itself the seeds of its own decay. A husband
begins by kissing a pretty girl, his wife; it is pleasant to have her so
handy and so willing. He ends by making machiavellian efforts to
avoid kissing the every day sharer of his meals, books, bath towels,
pocketbook, relatives, ambitions, secrets, malaises and business: a
proceeding about as romantic as having his boots blacked. The
thing is too horribly dismal for words. Not all the native
sentimentalism of man can overcome the distaste and boredom that