dissolution of which is a fault or, at least, an ignominy.
The essential element is not so much duration as security.
Two people must be tied together in order to do themselves justice;
for twenty minutes at a dance, or for twenty years in a marriage
In both cases the point is, that if a man is bored in the first
five minutes he must go on and force himself to be happy.
Coercion is a kind of encouragement; and anarchy (or what
some call liberty) is essentially oppressive, because it is
essentially discouraging. If we all floated in the air like bubbles,
free to drift anywhere at any instant, the practical result would
be that no one would have the courage to begin a conversation.
It would be so embarrassing to start a sentence in a friendly whisper,
and then have to shout the last half of it because the other
party was floating away into the free and formless ether
The two must hold each other to do justice to each other.
If Americans can be divorced for "incompatibility of temper"
I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced.
I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one.
The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive
the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable.
For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.

* * *

VIII

THE WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY

In the course of this crude study we shall have to touch on what is
called the problem of poverty, especially the dehumanized poverty