Seeing that I was entirely serious, the Professor said: “My feeling always has been that the chief reason for the want of success in marriage and the deterrent spectacle it so often has presented, is the tradition that any legerdemain of sentiment or ritual can make two people one. Understand me, I believe wholly in the ideal of a spiritual oneness. I have no quarrel with the Scriptures on that score. But we cannot walk the path toward a spiritual oneness with our eyes shut, by lying to ourselves. The interests of two people may be one in the highest sense, they may have one aim, if they are absolutely congenial they may have one wish; but nothing conceivable under the sky ever can make them more or less than two people. The other day some of us were debating whether we should say ‘seven-and-five _is_ twelve’ or ‘seven and five _are_ twelve.’ They called seven and five here a ‘singular concept’ and some were for _is_ in consequence. But at least man and woman _are_. One and one do not make one, they make two. Indeed, after marriage, the two are more definitely two than they were before. Personal sacrifice proceeds in the order of intimacy. Society is built upon individual sacrifice. Friendship lives by concession, and the intimacy of marriage carries to the extreme point the idea of inter-personal compromise, the recognition of the personality of another. To expect two people to lose, without effort, by the mere fact of marriage, the individuality which they had before the compact, is as absurd as it would be to take two clocks and tie them together with a piece of pink string and expect them instantly to begin keeping absolutely the same time. What would you find in the case of the clocks? They might be mated clocks, and on opposite sides of the room might pass for two clocks keeping precisely the same time. But when you put them side by side you would discover, unless they were supernatural clocks, that they were running some seconds apart, and those few seconds would be as potent in visibly differentiating the clocks thus married as a full minute or more would be on opposite sides of the room. So that when two lovers, who have made elaborate concession to each other before marriage, anticipating each other’s desires, yielding to each other’s prejudices, proceed after marriage to throw the whole burden of preserving harmony upon some vaguely defined potentiality in the marriage relation itself, they certainly are tempting Providence into impatience. It is the lesson of sociology that man must pay something--yield something--for the companionship of the other man, and the closer you wish to be to the other man the more you must pay, the more you must yield. When it comes to the companionship of the man and the woman, and when the woman receives or demands equal rights and privileges, the need of concession is vastly complicated, for now the association is not only between two persons but between two