Each married pair must solve its own difficulties as best it can. If any
advice were worth the offering, it would be this:

O ye Husbands, and O ye Wives, if not for your own sakes then for your
children's, lead a straight, clean, honorable life; any other sort of
life leads to despicability, to dismalness, to disaster.--Which only
means, after all, that

In the marriage relation, as in every relation--the social, the
industrial, the commercial, the political--it is conduct, it is
character, that counts, nothing else;

Beauty--Wealth--Culture--Grace--Wit--Intellect--Sprightliness--
Vivacity--Humor--these are much but they are simply naught, and less
than naught, when just this simple, single, yet insatiable thing called
Man wants to live amicably, affectionately, martially, with that simple,
single, but incomprehensible thing called Woman.

Character--Conduct--rule the world, the Matrimonial equally with the
Municipal.

* * *




XIV. On this Human Heart

"The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can