The gulf perhaps began to open between them when one became aware of the other’s absence at a moment when he himself was most present; or when one felt that their bodies stood between their souls, the other that their souls stood between their bodies; or when one felt a restriction of liberty from the other’s superior spiritual or sensual force; or when one found that he could never show his innermost being without its putting the other out of humour. Thus two persons, each one innocent, may make each other profoundly solitary while sharing the same bed and board. Neither receives from the other what his innermost nature needs—and what one gives is only a constraint upon the other’s nature. Not a note in the soul of one is tuned to the same pitch as the other’s; not a movement in the blood of one is capable of enrapturing the other’s. Now it is unbearable dissimilarities, now unbearable similarities, that cause the trouble; each finds in the other “all the virtues he detests but none of the faults he loves.” With all this, perfect outward peace may prevail; nay, respect and devotion in a certain sense. That this is the fortune of innumerable marriages is overlooked in general, since married life usually continues—unless a third appears. In the ideas of the Church, the incapacity for marriage of one party freed the other from the duty of fidelity. In the more spiritual view of the future it will be equally evident that the same right exists to dissolve a marriage which has remained unconsummated in a spiritual sense; and there may be just as many possibilities of incapacity to fulfil the spiritual claims of marriage as there are men and women; therefore also just as many causes of divorce. In the preceding pages only certain typical cases of unhappiness have been referred to. The many tragic exceptions are here left altogether on one side. So also are those causes of divorce which the preachers of monogamy call the “real misfortunes”: drunkenness, bodily cruelty, and the like; for with the customary realism of “idealism,” they admit these as valid reasons for divorce. It is significant that among the lower classes people still often think themselves bound to bear these misfortunes as a part of the miscalculations of marriage as unavoidable as those more complex sufferings which the champions of monogamy exhort people on a higher plane to endure. The pangs a soul suffers may, they think, be borne with God’s help, whereas unfortunately God is not in the habit of interfering when a man beats his wife; and the longer a soul has suffered, the more certain are they that it can continue to suffer. Nor do they perceive that a relationship may have seemed good—perhaps even have been good,—until, after a lapse of years, a moment has arrived which has stripped the soul of one of them naked, sometimes in all its loftiness, more often in all its baseness. If the latter, then what was possible before becomes from that hour unthinkable.