Withal there is an absence of the cynicism which is a general characteristic of Strindberg's writings on sexual love; we get a surfeit of realism, but we also get pages of playful and almost tender sympathy with love's happiness and sweet illusion. The story of a young couple's improvident marriage, of their enjoyment of the home with its brand-new things--from the sky-blue quilts to the well-cut glasses--of the careless happiness which is young and foolish, and forgets all about work and duty and the wolves without until the birth of the child and bankruptcy disturb the dream, is an imperishable gem of human description. And the story of the crotchety and greedy old bachelor of irreproachable private life and well-timed permissible vices, who finally marries and becomes an ideal husband and a doting father, is proof of the author's recognition of family-life as a bridge between egotism and altruism. The youth who falls in love with the blossoming girl of fourteen, and is compelled to postpone marriage until he joins his fate to the faded and sickly woman of twenty-four, with a worm-eaten nose (who ever saw anyone with a worm-eaten nose? Strindberg's strength of expression is embarrassing), spends married life in vain languishing for the perished beauty of fourteen. Finally--and when too late--he discovers that the lost angel has all the time been by his side, though disguised in ungainliness of form and feature. The story is a miniature of man's earthly conduct. The child is always the apotheosis of sexual union, the redeemer of the petty nature of husband and wife. The woman who shouts "I am not your servant" to the exasperated husband does so because she is not sanctified by motherliness. Though the primitive fidelity with which Strindberg sketches his matrimonial types, jars on our sensibilities through ineptitudes of diction and occasional vulgarisms, though we feel irritated with his boneless and martyrised husbands, _Married_ is at once a work of art, and a plea for the super-marriage which is yet to come.