If even within the sphere of romantic love no two cases are exactly alike, how could love before marriage be the same as after marriage when so many new experiences, ideas, and associations come into play? Above all, the feelings relating to the children bring an entirely new group of tones into the complex harmony of affection. The intimacies of married life, the revelation of characteristics undiscovered before marriage, the deeper sympathy, the knowledge that theirs is "one glory an' one shame"--these and a hundred other domestic experiences make romantic love undergo a change into something that may be equally rich and strange but is certainly quite different. A wife's charms are different from a girl's and inspire a different kind of love. The husband loves Those virtues which, before untried, The wife has added to the bride, as Samuel Bishop rhymes it. In their predilection for maidens, poets, like novelists, have until recently ignored the wife too much. But Cowper sang: What is there in the vale of life Half so delightful as a wife, When friendship, love and peace combine To stamp the marriage bond divine? The stream of pure and genuine love Derives its current from above; And earth a second Eden shows, Where'er the healing water flows. Some of the specifically romantic ingredients of love, on the other hand--adoration, hyperbole, the mixed moods of hope and despair--do not normally enter into conjugal affection. No one would fail to see the absurdity of a husband's exclaiming O that I were a glove upon that hand That I might touch that cheek. He _may_ touch that cheek, and kiss it too--and that makes a tremendous difference in the tone and tension of his feelings. Unlike the lover, the husband does not think, feel, and speak in perpetual hyperboles. He does not use expressions like "beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical," or speak of The cruel madness of love The honey of poisonous flowers. There is no madness or cruelty in conjugal love: in its normal state it is all peace, contentment, happiness, while romantic love, in its normal state, is chiefly unrest, doubt, fear, anxiety, torture and anguish of heart--with alternating hours of frantic elation--until the Yes has been spoken. The emotions of a husband are those of a mariner who has entered into the calm harbor of matrimony with his treasure safe and sound, while the romantic lover is as one who is still on the high seas of uncertainty, storm-tossed one moment, lifted sky-high on a wave of hope, the next in a dark abyss of despair. It is indeed lucky that conjugal affection does differ so widely from romantic love; such nervous tension, doubt, worry, and constant friction between hope and despair would, if continued after marriage, make life a burden to the most loving couples. WHY SAVAGES VALUE WIVES