“When I was younger even than I am now,” said the Minor Poet, “I thought a good deal of marriage—very young men do. My wife, I told myself, must be a woman of mind. Yet, curiously, of all the women I have ever loved, no single one has been remarkable for intellect—present company, as usual, of course excepted.” “Why is it,” sighed the Philosopher, “that in the most serious business of our life, marriage, serious considerations count for next to nothing? A dimpled chin can, and often does, secure for a girl the best of husbands; while virtue and understanding combined cannot be relied upon to obtain her even one of the worst.” “I think the explanation is,” replied the Minor Poet, “that as regards, let us say, the most natural business of our life, marriage, our natural instincts alone are brought into play. Marriage—clothe the naked fact in what flowers of rhetoric we will—has to do with the purely animal part of our being. The man is drawn towards it by his primeval desires; the woman by her inborn craving towards motherhood.” The thin, white hands of the Old Maid fluttered, troubled, where they lay upon her lap. “Why should we seek to explain away all the beautiful things of life?” she said. She spoke with a heat unusual to her. “The blushing lad, so timid, so devotional, worshipping as at the shrine of some mystic saint; the young girl moving spell-bound among dreams! They think of nothing but of one another.” [Picture: Why should we seek to explain away all the beautiful things of life?] “Tracing a mountain stream to its sombre source need not mar its music for us as it murmurs through the valley,” expounded the Philosopher. “The hidden law of our being feeds each leaf of our life as sap runs through the tree. The transient blossom, the ripened fruit, is but its changing outward form.”