One day when the Professor had called a bachelor a bird without feet, and I had retorted that an old maid was a bird without wings, the Professor remarked significantly: “the old maid at least settles better,” and we fell to talking of settling as a proposition. Between the predicament of a bird who cannot fly and that of a bird who cannot alight, there might not be much of a choice, though the Professor did her utmost to prove that the bird condemned to perpetual flitting was in the more pitiful situation. But it occurred to me as significant that the man should dread to lose the privilege of flight, and the woman the privilege of settling. I wondered if there was anything more in it than the accident of contention. We had agreed with Tolstoi, that “nothing complicates the difficulties of life so much as a lack of harmony between married people”; we had agreed that much of complication arose from a lack of antecedent harmony as to the matrimonial proposition. “Do you not think, Professor,” I asked, “that much of the trouble comes--that most of the trouble comes--from the simple error of forgetting that an institution cannot be better than those who represent or expound it? Is there not a tendency, a very old one, doubtless, to expect that marriage, in itself, will somehow, transmute the participants? Can marriage be more of a success than people, or less of a failure than people? Marriage is a bond, with a benediction, if you like; but it is not a translation. Surely we cannot take from marriage more than we carry to it--unless it might be the reasonable and natural interest on the combined capital.”