A man as intimate with his own wife as
a magistrate is with his clerk, or a Prime Minister with the
leader of the Opposition, is a man in ten thousand. The majority
of married couples never get to know one another at all: they only
get accustomed to having the same house, the same children, and
the same income, which is quite a different matter. The
comparatively few men who work at home--writers, artists, and to
some extent clergymen--have to effect some sort of segregation
within the house or else run a heavy risk of overstraining their
domestic relations. When the pair is so poor that it can afford
only a single room, the strain is intolerable: violent quarrelling
is the result. Very few couples can live in a single-roomed
tenement without exchanging blows quite frequently. In the
leisured classes there is often no real family life at all. The
boys are at a public school; the girls are in the schoolroom in
charge of a governess; the husband is at his club or in a set
which is not his wife's; and the institution of marriage enjoys
the credit of a domestic peace which is hardly more intimate than
the relations of prisoners in the same gaol or guests at the same
garden party. Taking these two cases of the single room and the
unearned income as the extremes, we might perhaps locate at a
guess whereabout on the scale between them any particular family
stands.
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