"And marriage means happiness--in a book."

"I'm not sure that it does in this case. The time would come, after
Litvinof had told Tatiana everything, when she would have to ask herself,
and not once only, what sort of man it really was who was willing to
break his engagement and run off with another man's wife, and whether he
could ever repent enough for it. She could make excuses for him, and
would, but at the bottom of her heart--No, it seems to me that there,
almost for the only time, Tourguenief permitted himself an amiable
weakness. All that part of the book has the air of begging the question."

"But don't you see," said Miss Cotton, leaning forward in the way she had
when very earnest, "that he means to show that her love is strong enough
for all that?"

"But he doesn't, because it isn't. Love isn't strong enough to save
people from unhappiness through each other's faults. Do you suppose that
so many married people are unhappy in each other because they don't love
each other? No; it's because they do love each other that their faults
are such a mutual torment. If they were indifferent, they wouldn't mind
each other's faults. Perhaps that's the reason why there are so many
American divorces; if they didn't care, like Europeans, who don't marry
for love, they could stand it."

"Then the moral is," said Mrs. Pasmer, at her lightest through the
surrounding gravity, "that as all Americans marry for love, only
Americans who have been very good ought to get married."

"I'm not sure that the have-been goodness is enough either," said Mrs.
Brinkley, willing to push it to the absurd. "You marry a man's future as