The groom not only has to see what resistance there is, but has to know that he must remove it all. The bride herself has no more power or control over these resistances than she would if she were literally buried under tons of rock. She depends entirely on his work to get at her soul. Will he ecstatically embrace one of these stones that cover her up? Like the child calling a stick a horse, will he say: “This stone is my wife. If I can believe hard enough, she may change, in my eyes, into my wife and I shall be spared the effort of releasing her from the weight which now oppresses her. How sweet and tender this stone is! How it throbs and palpitates as I squeeze it tightly in my arms! There, it has melted entirely. Dear wife!” Insane? Yes. And the woman herself, alive and breathing under the load of stone which antiquity with more than bestial blindness, with infinitely more than granite heartlessness and marble stupidity has heaped upon her for centuries, is so deeply buried that she cannot herself even direct her own release. Dimly she hears her man apostrophizing with love the outermost stone. Will he ever get the sense to drop it, pick up one after the other of those overwhelming _her_, and actually penetrate to her and grasp her in his arms. Good heavens! How can intelligence be conveyed to that imbecile? Or instead of hearing her husband hallucinating her release by means of rapturously caressing a stone that holds her down, she may have the still more poignant agony of hearing him make love to a woman already released from her bonds by some other man. “Damnation inconceivable! Is he, my husband, willing to take the woman whom other hands have released, whom the work of other men has made practically theirs, and whom he virtually steals, or as a beggar accepts like a fruit skin from another’s feast? “Or is it,” the poor soul may think to herself, “that really in my own true being, I am less attractive than the women whose weight of oppression so many men have cheerfully lifted? What have I done to make myself so unattractive? Must I curse my parents, who have, besides, perhaps, helped to entomb me alive under these stones?” § 159 The situation in many marriages is not less tragic than this. The husband in this case has either not been able to see the obstacles that lie between him and complete emotional fusion with his wife, or if he has seen them, he has not thought himself able to remove them. In either case he may be more ignorant than to blame; but not after he once gets the point of view of this book. His accomplishment, the only virile accomplishment in the world, is plainly before him. He must acquaint himself with the exact amount of resistance and repression; and he must remove it piece by piece if it takes a half a century. He must realize fully that it is a piece of constructive work, and that no one else can do it for him. § 160