“What good would your devilish experience do me?” said Alan, impatiently. “It would fit any man's case if he'd only believe it. I've made a study of love. I've observed hundreds of typical cases, and watched marriage from inception through protracted illness or boredom down to dumb resignation or sudden death. I don't mean that no lovers of the ideal, sentimental brand are ever happy after marriage, but I do believe that open-eyed courtship will beat the blind sort all hollow, and that, in nine cases out of ten, if people were mated by law according to the judgment of a sensible, open-eyed jury, they would be happier than they now are. Nothing ever spoken is truer than the commandment, 'Thou shalt have no other God but me.'Let a man put anything above the principle of living right and he will be miserable. The man who holds gold as the chief thing in life will starve to death in its cold glitter, while a pauper in rags will have a laugh that rings with the music of immortal joy. In the same way the man who declares that only one woman is suited to him is making a god of her--raising her to a seat that won't support her dead, material weight. I frankly believe that the glamour of love is simply a sort of insanity that has never been correctly named and treated because so many people have been the victims of it.” “Do you know,” Alan burst in, almost angrily, “when you talk that way I think you are off. I know what's the matter with you; you have simply frittered away your heart, your ability to love and appreciate a good woman. Thank Heaven! your experience has not been mine. I don't see how you could ever be happy with a woman. I couldn't look a pure wife in the face and remember all the flirtations you've indulged in--that is, if they were mine.”