are not so bad; but where such soul-youth does not exist, and the parties live in passable harmony, still there's great harm done,—in faic, constructive wificide, and this is the reason why,—a wife is apt to become a mother quicker by an old husband than a young one; because the old man's blood is cooler, his passion slower in culmination; and she is likely to conceive from sheer weariness, and physical and mental inability to guard herself; besides which, she never dreams of danger, or of the female finesses she would put in play against a younger husband.
If ever it is right to prevent conception, I believe it is in exceptional cases like this before us; for his old blood, through his child, courses through her young veins, making her old prematurely; loading her down with the accumulated mental, physical and moral, magnetic and other diseases of all his long run of years. Besides which, his child is born old;—never knows what babyhood is, or childhood means. It looks, feels, is an oddity; knows no infantile days or pleasures, and is thus, by its own father, robbed and cheated out of its best and most halcyon days. But that's not the worst of it yet; for the offspring of January is sure to be nearly as calcareous as its father. Its bones are harder, firmer, more solid than is right; its cranium is broader, flatter, thicker, and dense as those of a grown man; and if the young mother escapes forceps-delivery, or a still worse operation, she may consider herself a fortunate woman. May God pity all such, and alas! thousands of such there are.
How often we hear the expression, "She tapped the fountains of his love." Well, the thing is possible, yet is seldom realized, for that can only be done when both are maritally conjoined while influenced by a passion born of perfect, deep, soul-founded love; and then! ah, then! the cup of human bliss is indeed full. Why? Because a portion of each soul becomes incorporate in the other, and the mystical blending—"they twain shall be one"—is complete.
But souls can be tapped without reciprocity, for the young wife's soul is drained from her, either directly as a sponge, by her old husband, or indirectly through the uterine and vaginal diseases sure to be her lot sooner or later; for the fluids of the twain will not, cannot blend, except in so far forth as to innoculate the poor young thing
