There is another point which ought to be considered as contributing to the ill-success of many marriages, and which no doubt is closely connected with that just discussed--but which deserves separate treatment. I mean the harshness of the line which social opinion (at any rate in this country) draws round the married pair with respect to their relations to outsiders. On the one hand, and within the matrimonial relation, society allows practically the utmost passional excess or indulgence, and condones it; on the other hand (I am speaking of the middling bulk of the people, not of the extreme aristocratic and slum classes) beyond that limit, the slightest familiarity, or any expression of affection which might by any possibility be interpreted as deriving from sexual feeling, is sternly anathematised. Marriage, by a kind of absurd fiction, is represented as an oasis situated in the midst of an arid desert--in which latter, it is pretended, neither of the two parties is so fortunate as to find any objects of real affectional interest. If they do they have carefully to conceal the same from the other party. The result of this convention is obvious enough. The married pair, thus _driven_ as well as drawn into closest continual contact with each other, are put through an ordeal which might well cause the stoutest affection to quail. Not only, as already pointed out, have the man and the wife too few joint interests in the great world, few common plans, projects, purposes, 'causes,' recreations; but--by this insistance of public opinion--all outside interests of a _personal_ nature, except of the most abstract kind, are also debarred; if there happens to be any natural jealousy in the case it is heightened and made the more imperative; and unless the contracting parties are fortunate enough to be, both of them, of such a temperament that they are capable of strong attachments to persons of their own sex--and this does not always exclude jealousy--they must be condemned to have no intimate friendships of any kind except what they can find at their own fireside. It is necessary here to point out, not only how dull a place this makes the home, but also how narrowing it acts on the lives of the married pair. However appropriate the union may be in itself it cannot be good that it should degenerate--as it tends to degenerate so often, and where man and wife are most faithful to each other, into a mere _égoisme à deux_. And right enough no doubt as a great number of such unions actually are, it must be confessed that the bourgeois marriage as a rule, and just in its most successful and pious and respectable form, carries with it an odious sense of Stuffiness and narrowness, moral and intellectual; and that the type of Family which it provides is too often like that which is disclosed when on turning over a large stone we disturb an insect. Home that seldom sees the light.