later it fails to make us even content. Love will light up with a
wonderful color lives that are given to honest work, but even love
cannot make idleness other than a wearisome career. Then there are
couples who have refused to have children. If the reason be that some
possibility of disease has made it seem wrong to have children, it may
be that both will learn to adapt themselves to this limitation and to
achieve happiness in spite of it. Thousands of couples who are
childless against their own wills have learnt none the less to live
together in lasting happiness. But when childlessness is the result of
a mere selfish policy, it often revenges itself upon the couple
concerned. They have deliberately refused satisfaction to one of the
deepest instincts within them, and though they may not realize it,
those suppressed instincts destroy their harmony of being. They do not
face the fact that they have such instincts, because they could not
meet them with any adequate reason for suppressing them. They try to
deceive themselves into believing that the instincts are not there, or
they repress them from selfish causes, and life does not let them off.
Love remains unsatisfied. Its august claims have been refused. And
therefore it does not and cannot continue to bring them joy.

Another reason for unhappy marriages I have already spoken of in a
previous chapter. Sometimes they were marriages of passion and not of
love. Sometimes men and women allow themselves to be hurried into union
by the driving force of an almost impersonal thing that is purely
physical in nature, and though they think they are acting out of love,
they are leaving out the larger part of their natures. Mind and spirit
may have had no part at all in the transaction. And after such a step
there is bound to come a painful awakening. After a while he or she
will find that in the most intimate part of married life only the body
is acting, and then two people who have got very close to one another