If you get into the papers, the pretence of not
knowing becomes impossible. But it is hardly too much to say that
if you avoid these two perils, you can do anything you like, as
far as your neighbors are concerned. And since we can hardly
flatter ourselves that this is the effect of charity, it is
difficult not to suspect that our extraordinary forbearance in the
matter of stone throwing is that suggested in the well-known
parable of the women taken in adultery which some early free-
thinker slipped into the Gospel of St John: namely, that we all
live in glass houses. We may take it, then, that the ideal husband
and the ideal wife are no more real human beings than the
cherubim. Possibly the great majority keeps its marriage vows in
the technical divorce court sense. No husband or wife yet born
keeps them or ever can keep them in the ideal sense.
MARRIAGE AS A MAGIC SPELL
The truth which people seem to overlook in this matter is that the
marriage ceremony is quite useless as a magic spell for changing
in an instant the nature of the relations of two human beings to
one another. If a man marries a woman after three weeks
acquaintance, and the day after meets a woman he has known for
twenty years, he finds, sometimes to his own irrational surprise
and his wife's equally irrational indignation, that his wife
is a stranger to him, and the other woman an old friend.
Pages:
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68