A long friendship and a short engagement is perhaps the best combination. A prolonged engagement is the most trying relationship between the sexes possible to conceive. For the woman it means the drawbacks of matrimony without its charm of restful finality, or any of its solid worldly advantages. On the man’s side it means the irksomeness of the marriage yoke without any of its satisfactions and comforts. On the man, indeed, a long engagement is especially hard, as at least the woman is spared the burden of ordering his food and coping with his servants. Many a sincere affection has been killed by the restraints and irritations of a long engagement. Many a genuine passion has waned during its dreary course, until but a feeble spark of the great flame is left to light the wedded life, and both man and woman carry the mark of that suppressed ardour which, under happier circumstances, might have come to a joyous fruition. Their children, too, sometimes lack vitality, and show the need of the fire that died before they were begotten. * * * I don’t know who it was who first coined the phrase ‘the appalling intimacy of married life’; certainly it is an apt expression, and one wonders at what period in the world’s history men and women began to find that intimacy ‘appalling.’ It sounds a modern enough complaint, and somehow one feels sure it was never indulged in by our grandmothers, who looked upon their husbands as a kind of visible embodiment of the Lord’s Will, and respected them accordingly. They would never have dreamed of finding irksome what Mrs Lynn Linton called the ‘_chair-à-chair_ closeness of the English home.’ Much has been written of the degradation of love by habit, and Alexandre Dumas expresses the whole question to perfection in one crystal sentence: ‘In marriage when love exists habit kills it; when love does not exist habit calls it into being.’ This is profoundly true, and for every passion habit has killed it must certainly have created more genuine affections. The Spartan plan of allowing husband and wife to meet only by stealth shows an acute understanding of human nature and has much to recommend it, if the object in view is to prolong the period of passion. But we are not now dealing with passion, but with the ordinary affection between people who have to live together under the trying conditions of modern marriage, and in these circumstances one must agree with Dumas as to the wonders worked by habit.