Notoriously it is rather hard to come by. City crowds at night present
the spectacle of people making huge and fevered efforts to run delight
to earth and often achieving only pitiful failure. I believe the normal
way in which delight ought to enter the lives of married people is just
through their satisfaction in each other's society, enriched by the
society of their children. When a man and a woman have made the right
sort of home they escape finally from all fevered cravings after
picture-houses and ball-rooms. There lies to hand for them that which
will day after day refresh and delight them, and make them ready for
to-morrow's toil.

I am not forgetting that at this point modern voices will want to break
in on me with appropriate quotations from Bernard Shaw and others, and
try to silence me by pointing out what a mean, petty, dull, sickly, and
stodgy thing mere domesticity can be. Yes! it can be all that for
people who let it be all that. Even love that once was passionate
cannot redeem the life of two people unless there is something there to
redeem. Two lifeless and stupid people living together _can_ make of
life something duller than either could make alone. If it be part of
general wisdom to try to live widely and fully, and to use as much of
our natures as is possible, that is surely as true for two people
together as it could be for them apart. And to make a marriage into a
great thing both parties to it must work to make it wide in its
horizons and worthy because of the multitude of its interests. No sane
persons imagine that mere marriage excuses people from the necessity
for handling this big, mysterious, and difficult thing which we call
human life with vigilance and determination. But life on any terms for
the great majority of people must have monotonous and trying periods in
it. It almost always has heavy sorrows and not a few bitter
disappointments. And it is in view of these things that married love is