‘Very hard to say. Oh, ecstasies aren’t for this world, you know--not permanent ecstasies. You might as well have permanent hysterics. And, as you’re aware, there are no marriages in heaven. So perhaps there’s no heaven in marriages either.’ These sentiments are of a nature to disgust and irritate the ignorant girl of twenty by their callous unreality in her eyes, and to delight the experienced woman of, say, thirty, by their profound truth in hers--so utterly do one’s ideas about life change in the course of ten years or so! Sixty years ago George Sand wrote: ‘You ask me whether you will be happy thro’ love and marriage. You will not, I am fully convinced, be so in either the one or the other. Love, fidelity, maternity are nevertheless the most important, the most necessary things in the life of a woman.’ To the same effect writes R. L. Stevenson when he says: ‘I suspect Love is rather too violent a passion to make in all cases a good domestic character.’ Of course no very young people will believe this, but it is a horrid sordid truth that, as a rule, the happiest marriages are those in which the couple do not love too intensely. I am speaking of solid, workaday happiness, not of ecstasies and raptures. The excessive claims made by passionate love and the fevered state of mind it produces are often the cause of its shipwreck. ‘If I am horrid, darling,’ a girl once said to her lover, when trying to make up a quarrel she herself had brought about, ‘it’s only because I love you so intensely.’ ‘Then, for God’s sake, love me less, and treat me better,’ snapped the outraged lover, and we can but sympathise with him. I have purposely used the word _Affection_ in this division, in place of one signifying a greater degree of feeling, and I unhesitatingly state that generally speaking, the most successful marriages are those which--‘when the first sweet sting of love be past, the sweet that almost venom is,’ develop into the temperate, unexacting, peaceful and harmonious unions which come under this heading. To the ardent youths and maidens--restless seekers after the elusive joy of life--who will have none of this prosaic and inglorious counsel, and who are prepared to stake their all on the belief that the first sweet sting of love is going to last for ever, I say: Get your roses-and-raptures over some other way; don’t look for romance in marriage or, unless your case prove the exception to the rule, you will inevitably make a terrible mistake! . . . Oh, don’t ask _me_ how it is to be done, but remember what I say, and don’t marry until the quiet, sober, beautiful and restful affection you now scorn becomes in your eyes a haven of peace from the storm and stress of life, and the highest good it contains.