and the virtuous satanry of the honeymoon. The husband will not
come back to precisely the same wife that he parted from, and the
wife will not welcome precisely the same husband. Even supposing
them to have gone on substantially as if together, they will have
gone on out of sight and hearing of each other, Thus each will
find the other, to some extent at least, a stranger, and hence a bit
challenging, and hence a bit charming. The scheme has merit.
More, it has been tried often, and with success. It is, indeed, a
familiar observation that the happiest couples are those who are
occasionally separated, and the fact has been embalmed in the trite
maxim that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Perhaps not
actually fonder, but at any rate more tolerant, more curious, more
eager. Two difficulties, however, stand in the way of the
widespread adoption of the remedy. One lies in its costliness: the,
average couple cannot afford a double establishment, even
temporarily. The other lies in the fact that it inevitably arouses the
envy and ill-nature of those who cannot adopt it, and so causes a
gabbling of scandal. The world invariably suspects the worst. Let
man and wife separate to save their happiness from suffocation in
the kitchen, the dining room and the connubial chamber, and it will
immediately conclude that the corpse is already laid out in the
drawing-room.




28.


Woman as Wife