evitable hiatus which renders her happy as she does not detect the illusion, but which would be a man's undoing if he detected it.
I thank the gods, then, that I was born a man and not a woman; and I thank them, furthermore, that no woman by some life-long attachment holds me in duty bound to be constantly reflecting that it ought not to have been.
Indeed, what a passing strange device is marriage! And what makes it all the stranger is the suggestion that it is to be a step taken without thought. And yet no step is more decisive, for nothing in life is as inexorable and masterful as the marriage tie. And now so important a step as marriage ought, so we are told, to be taken without reflection! Yet marriage is not something simple but something immensely complex and indeterminate. Just as the meat of the turtle smacks of all kinds of meat, so likewise does marriage have a taste of all manner of things; and just as the turtle is a sluggish animal, likewise is marriage a sluggish thing. Falling in love is, at least, a simple thing, but marriage—! Is it something heathen or something Christian, something spiritual or something profane, or something civil, or something of all things? Is it an expression of an inexplicable love, the elective affinity of souls in delicate accord with one another; or is it a duty, or a partnership, or a mere convenience, or the custom of certain countries — or is it a duty, or a partnership, or a mere convenience, or the custom of certain countries — or is it a little of all these? Is one to order the music for it from the town musician or the organist, or is one to have a little from both? Is it the minister or the police sergeant who is to make the speech and enroll the names in the book of life — or in the town register? Does marriage blow a tune on a comb, or does it listen to the whisperings "like to those of the fairies from the grottoes of a summer night"[1]
And now every Darby imagines he performed such a potpourri, such incomparably complex music, in getting married — and imagines that he is still performing it while
- ↑ A quotation from Oehlenschläger's "Aladdin."
