Does it then follow that spiritual love, a true union of souls, for which we claim a higher and a more lasting happiness, is a thing apart, wherein the physical must be kept under, put aside; or, if conceded to our common weakness (the penalty of our earthly existence), should be calmly and occasionally indulged, only under official licence, in secret as a shameful deed? Certainly _not_. The pure know far more of passion than the loose. But, as other bodily pleasure, i.e., self-expression, gains strength and depth by taking responsibility for itself, "ordering" itself; so, above all, does our strongest, and most ultimate, physical need. It is the true passion, naturally found in comradeship and love, spontaneously constant and controlled, which will complete man's vitality, deepen and strengthen, while it steadies, physique. Spiritually the one expresses itself by _taking_, the other achieves itself by _giving_. The biggest adventure in life, the deepest and truest feelings do, actually, involve that emotional abandon, or complete self-forgetting, which modernists exalt. But the giving away of one's whole self, that is, expressing one's whole self in passionate service, is _not_ achieved by sudden, untested intimacy. It can only come, or grow, for those who seek understanding of each other, suffer the first mystery—(stirring the wonder dreams of youth)—to unfold and reveal itself in steady, controlled devotion to the vision of romance. Then, and only then (soon or late, as the individual self prompts), he shall dare, _because he knows_. In other words, the physical passion, in which to-day men find the _birth_ of love, belongs in nature to maturity and completion, when man has gained the courage to be himself and express himself. It is the harvest of pure romance, only possible to those who have earned full knowledge of themselves and of each other. The humdrum pictures of insincere marriage, with which fiction is crowded to-day, come from mistakes or spiritual failure to be one's best self, _not_ from constancy and faith. The need to perpetually revive intense emotion with a new mistress can never be felt in a true marriage. It _is_ inevitable for so-called "free" love, the bitterest slavery of man. For wedded love—that is, the permanent union of body and soul—there is ever a new and wonderful adventure, the deepening mystery of the closer bond. And the highest happiness, which is _intense_ emotion, has the gravest responsibilities, demanding the greatest courage and hope. As Mr. Middleton Murray has written in _The Things We Are_: "The taking of a wife or the taking of a friend is an eternal act; if it be less, it is a treachery, a degradation."