The only permanent relations are founded on mutual contempt. Brothers and sisters have no illusions about each other, and if they feel any affection at all it is a steadfast one. Alas! the close knowledge of weaknesses very seldom permits the affection to show through the contempt. Married lovers have to pass from the state of love, which is so apt to be a state of delusion, to the state of clear-sighted affection. The ordeal is one which very few survive. Another tragedy of love is jealousy. A man or woman is very often jealous of the partner’s brothers and sisters, or other relations. Those who love wish to be all in all to each other, those who quarrel dislike to have others taking sides in their quarrels. This fundamental jealousy of relations is ever apt to break into a flame, besides jealousy of the more usual kind. Mr. Harold Gorst has written a book on _The Philosophy of Love_, in which he points out that it is unwise of a bridegroom to take instant possession of his bride. He maintains that the usual programme, in which a wife shows all her modesty and a husband all his love on the wedding-night, is an absurd waste of the honeymoon, which ought to be spent in a gradual approach to the supreme surrender. Again, wives are too apt to give up the charming resistances which are necessary to the satisfaction of a man’s emotional nature. Mr. Gorst cannot imagine that a husband would tire of his wife if she kept her right over her own body with a firm hand, and required wooing every time she yielded to the wedding of her husband. So much for the man of the world’s point of view. The marriage tie is a way of keeping people together while they undergo the various disillusions and jealousies that are inevitable, unless one of them is prepared to give way in everything. Is there any better way? In most cases, no. The marriage tie will always exist, because it is the natural impulse of the majority of young people to wish to love each other alone, and to remain with each other for ever. The honeymoon having elapsed, they very likely find they are about to become parents, and they spend the intervening months in making happy preparations. Then the baby is born, and has to be brought up until it is old enough to go to school. If there are three children, they have to be looked after for about fourteen years. The wife is now thirty-four, and the husband thirty-eight. The children are placed in various schools away from home. Is there any alternative to the rather boring life that has to be lived out until death parts the parents? None. They are not rich enough to travel and amuse themselves, so the wife goes on housekeeping and calling on neighbours, and changing her servants, and the husband goes to the City, plays golf, and reads trashy novels. The marriage tie must always persist while these people exist.