perverseness very uncommon. Sometimes lovers have been very tender
and devoted so long as a doubt of ultimate mutual possession
remained to give zest to their passion, but the moment this doubt
has been removed, one or the other has become incomprehensibly
indifferent.

I have noticed that very few married pairs are matches in the
matter of warmth and expression of passion between the parties.
The man will be all devotion and tenderness--brimming with
expressions of affection and exhibitions of fondness, and the
woman all coolness and passivity, or (which is much more common)
the woman will be active in expression, lavishing caresses and
tendernesses upon a man who very possibly grows harder and colder
with every delicate proof that the whole wealth of his wife's
nature is poured at his feet, as a libation upon an altar. It is
here that we see some of the strangest cases of perverseness that
it is possible to conceive. I know men who are not bad men--who,
I suppose, really love and respect their wives--and who would deny
themselves even to heroism to give them the comforts and luxuries
of life, yet who find themselves moved to reject with poorly-covered
scorn, and almost to resent, the varied expressions of affection to
which those wives give utterance. I know wives who long to pour
their hearts into the hearts of their husbands, and to get sympathetic
and fitting response, but who are never allowed to do it. They live
a constrained, suppressed, unsatisfied life. They absolutely pine
for the privilege of saying freely what they feel, in all love's varied
languages, toward men who love them, but who grow harder with
every approach of tenderness and colder with every warm, invading
breath. A shower that purifies the atmosphere, and refreshes the
face of heaven itself, sours cream, just as love's sweetest expression