delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to
swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and
exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. And
though of course nobody expects them to do anything so impossible
and so unwholesome, yet the law that regulates their relations,
and the public opinion that regulates that law, is actually
founded on the assumption that the marriage vow is not only
feasible but beautiful and holy, and that if they are false to it,
they deserve no sympathy and no relief. If all married people
really lived together, no doubt the mere force of facts would make
an end to this inhuman nonsense in a month, if not sooner; but it
is very seldom brought to that test. The typical British husband
sees much less of his wife than he does of his business partner,
his fellow clerk, or whoever works beside him day by day. Man and
wife do not as a rule, live together: they only breakfast
together, dine together, and sleep in the same room. In most cases
the woman knows nothing of the man's working life and he knows
nothing of her working life (he calls it her home life). It is
remarkable that the very people who romance most absurdly about
the closeness and sacredness of the marriage tie are also those
who are most convinced that the man's sphere and the woman's
sphere are so entirely separate that only in their leisure moments
can they ever be together. A man as intimate with his own wife as
a magistrate is with his clerk, or a Prime Minister with the
leader of the Opposition, is a man in ten thousand. The majority
of married couples never get to know one another at all: they only
get accustomed to having the same house, the same children, and
the same income, which is quite a different matter. The
comparatively few men who work at home--writers, artists, and to
some extent clergymen--have to effect some sort of segregation