Yes, since the period of the law and the influence of Rome and the idea of love, the practice of it by enduring families has become rapidly more complex. To the force of sex compulsion and instinct, never omitted, have been added permanency, monogamy, home-keeping virtues, pedagogy, public health, civic and political honor, democracy and a thousand such compounds. Has it stood up well under them? Is the load too great? Our riotous divorce practices and statistics, as well as the so-called sex or prostitution problem, raises a sharp question. Does the average strong successful man confine himself to one woman? Has he ever? Does the exceptionally beautiful and dynamic woman confine herself to one man? Has she ever? Has not fear frightened the weak into a kind of rat-like dodging or a sniveling, quarreling, complaining compliance? It may be and no doubt is true that the so-called “building of the future,” contemplated by the mechanistic or biologic impulse, if by anything, cannot be based on sensuality entirely; but the retort may be that Nature never seems to desire or achieve a wholesale debauchery any more than she desires a cold and narrow monogamy--the religionists and ethic-mongers to the contrary notwithstanding. At best she strikes a balance, wishes apparently virtue opposed to debauchery, _and vice versa_, for ends of her own. But to return. However mechanically and instinctively it may have started, Life has since developed the more or less gorgeous chemistry of love with which now, if never in the past, it is invested. Human beings are apparently capable of higher and more enduring synthetic and chemic affinities, and this to many has seemed to warrant the second thought wherewith this interview is prefaced. Yet, for all this higher development, the strain of practical life appears to be too much for it. Besides the compulsion imposed by the biologic process which draws two people together there is a process of self-evolution and variation which seems to conflict with the marriage tie. How subtle is that problem which is to keep two people, subject to internal and external chemical and physical changes, harmonious for the eternity for which they are supposed to be linked? Nothing short of this is the theory which the religionist propounds. The moralist, not bound by religious dogma, will make the bond for life only. The philosopher or chemist transmutes the bond into a problem and speculates on how many weeks, or months, or years, the unstable equation may endure.