For a couple who share it thus, everyday life will scintillate with little delights as a wheat-field at midsummer with cornflowers; and the high days will be white with joy as a spring garden with fruit blossoms. A couple who live thus will be able to play so that beyond their sport will always be the calm of tenderness; to smile so that behind their smiles will always lie an easily-aroused seriousness. Unless death interrupts them they will thus build up their life together as the Gothic cathedrals were built: buttress upon buttress, arch above arch, ornament within ornament, until finally the gilding of the topmost spire catches the last rays of the sunset. Thus great love already gives to two human beings what only completed development can give to mankind as a whole: unity between senses and soul, desire and duty, self-assertion and self-devotion, between the individual and the race, the present moment and the future. This condition—in which every advantage gained becomes a gift and every gift a profit; in which are united a continual emotion and a calm peace—is even now that which dreamers await as that of the third kingdom.[2] CHAPTER III LOVE’S FREEDOM The most delicate test of a person’s sense of morality is his power of interpreting ambiguous signs of the times in the ethical sphere; for only the profoundly moral can discover the dividing line, sharp as the edge of a sword, between new morality and old immorality. In our time ethical obtuseness betrays itself first and foremost by the condemnation of those young couples who freely unite their destinies. The majority does not perceive the advance in morality which this implies in comparison with the code of so many men, who without responsibility—and without apparent risk—purchase the repose of their senses. Those young men who choose “free love” know that bought love may destroy their finest instruments of mental activity; that it may result in injury to the wife as well as in the danger either of degeneracy on the part of the children, or of childishness, and may finally bring about their own premature downfall. But they also know that these results may not occur and that, on the other hand, they may suffer spiritually by curbing their personality and ruining their possibilities of single-hearted love. At the same time they despise their fathers’ less dangerous, but for that reason more unprincipled, expedient for sexual satisfaction, the seduction of women of the people, women with whom they never had any thought of community of life.