What the world calls a happy marriage is not wholly good--ease is bought with a price. Suppose Xantippe and Socrates had settled down and lived in a cottage with a vine growing over the portico, and two rows of hollyhocks leading from the front gate to the door; a pathway of coal-ashes lined off with broken crockery, and inside the house all sweet, clean and tidy; Socrates earning six drachmas a day carving marble, with double pay for overtime, and he handing the pay-envelope over to her each Saturday night, keeping out just enough for tobacco, and she putting a tidy sum in the AEgean Savings-Bank every month--why, what then? Well, that would have been an end of Socrates. Xantippe was big enough to know this and so she supplied the domestic cantharides and drove him out upon the streets--he grew to care very little for her, not much for the children, nothing for his home. She drove him out into the world of thought, instead of allowing him to settle down and be content with her society. I once knew a sculptor--another sculptor--an elemental bit of nature, original and, better still, aboriginal. He used to sleep out under the stars so as to wake up in the night and see the march of the Milky Way, and watch the Pleiades disappear over the brink of the western horizon. He wore a flannel shirt, thick-soled shoes, and overalls, no hat, and his hair was thick and coarse as a horse's mane. This man had talent, and he had sublime conceptions, great dreams, and splendid aspirations. His soul was struggling to find expression. "Leave him alone," I said. "He needs time to ripen. He is a Michelangelo in embryo!" Did he ripen? Not he. He married a Wellesley girl of good family. She, too, had ideas about art--she painted china-buttons for shirtwaists, embroidered chasubles and sang "The Rosary" in a raucous Quinsigamond voice. The big barbarian became respectable, and the last time I saw him he wore a Tuxedo and was passing out platitudes and raspberry-shrub at a lawn-party. The Wellesley girl had tamed her bear--they were very happy, he assured me, and she was preparing a course of lectures for him which he was to give at Mrs. Jack Gardner's. A Xantippe might have saved him. * * * * * A captious friend once suggested to Socrates this: "If you prize the female nature so highly, how does it happen that you do not instruct Xantippe?"--a rather indelicate proposition to put to a married man. And Socrates, quite unruffled, replied: "My friend, if one wants to learn horsemanship, does he choose a tame horse or one with mettle and a hard mouth? I wish to converse with all sorts of people, and I believe that nothing can disturb me after I grow accustomed to the tongue of Xantippe."