Nothing less binding than a lifelong contract is coercive enough or is sufficiently chastening to bridle woman's native changefulness and curb her instinctive emotionalism. The realisation that there is no way out of a situation is her finest incentive to nobility. She bruises her impulses against the iron of circumstance, and the essences of her intrinsic Woman-soul distil in patience and in sweetness. Under the harrow of sacrifice, she feels herself martyred. And yet without the sense of martyrdom, as may be also without the conditions thereof, no true woman is ever wholly content that she is fulfilling her destiny. Ellen Key writes of "_all the impurity that the sexual life shuts up within the whited sepulchre of legal marriage_." She falls here into the common error of assuming such evil to be restricted solely to the state of marriage. Whereas the higher interests, the duties and affections of the family life--purifying and inspiring influences lacking in unsanctioned unions--make inevitably for the uplifting of the relation. That some husbands and wives fall short of the pure intensity of passion possible to some others between whom love is the sole bond, is true, of course. But as are most other human developments, this is a matter of the character of individuals rather than of the terms of the bond uniting them. Certainly, high and tender passion is scarcely to be expected in a union for no better reason than that this is illicit. VIII Were life designed for happiness and pleasure merely, the case would be different. Were one life our sole portion, it might be different too. Having one life only, we might be justified in claiming for it the joy of the best love available. An unhappy or a less than happy marriage is only one, however, of the many expedients for the evolution of faculty. If the evolution of the individual progresses by way of countless earth-existences strung upon a thread of spiritual continuity, one life is but a brief and single page of everybody's great Life-serial. That is, doubtless, why all feel their lot to be an episode merely--unexplained, and incomplete, rather than a finished story. And in our innumerable pages and innumerable episodes, we must resign ourselves to sundry matrimonial vicissitudes. Says the author of _The World-Soul_, "The more function is specialised in either sex the less able either is to stand alone." This is argument for further and fuller specialisation of their respective functions, in both sexes, because so great is the happiness of fulfilling for that other his or her great need of us, and of being blessed by that other in our own need. But too, it raises the voluntary surrender of such happiness for honour's sake, for holiness' sake, for God's sake, or for children's sake, to the height of a renunciation which transfigures human life and character, and proportionally ennobles both.