are real epochs in our inner life. To the men of fifty years ago, the
bare avowal itself would have seemed little short of affected silliness.

Is the change all due to the teaching of the teachers and the preaching
of the preachers? I think not entirely. For, after all, the teachers and
the preachers are but a little ahead of the age they live in. They see
things earlier; they help to lead us up to them; but they do not wholly
produce the revolutions they inaugurate. Humanity as a whole develops
consistently along certain pre-established and predestined lines. Sooner
or later, a certain point must inevitably be reached; but some of us
reach it sooner, and most of us later. That's all the difference. Every
great change is mainly due to the fact that we have all already attained
a certain point in development. A step in advance becomes inevitable
after that, and one after another we are sure to take it. In one word,
what it needed a man of genius to see dimly thirty years ago, it needs a
singular fool not to see clearly nowadays.




XIV.

_THE DECLINE OF MARRIAGE._


Men don't marry nowadays. So everybody tells us. And I suppose we may
therefore conclude, by a simple act of inference, that women in turn
don't marry either. It takes two, of course, to make a quarrel--or a
marriage.