But why among these mute and dead numbers do we find the extremes of human misery and blessedness? Why do we see the most noble sacrifices and meannesses, the most ignoble baseness and the highest ideality, bound together, with a cruel irony, by a malignant fate; why do we see angels and demons dancing together as though enchanted by some fantastic waltz? For a very simple reason. Because the happiness of marriage between an old man and a young woman is nothing but an unstable and difficult balance granted to few. But to those who are capable of feeling it, it brings the sublime giddiness of the great heights. Everyone walks, but few take the leap to death. All climb the hills; exceedingly few have stood on the top of Mont Blanc. But those who do not break their necks, nor fall into the crevasses, experience, as they mount the highest and most difficult summit of the Alps, strong and fascinating emotions which make them proud and glad. All problems of life, whether great or small or indifferent, always have this dilemma hidden within them: _To dare or not to dare._ The Rubicon is either an historical fact, a myth, or a romance. I leave it to historians to decide; but every practical problem of happiness has its rubicon, at which the whole world pauses. Some turn back. Some leap over it. The most of them remain still on the bank all their lives, looking at the other side and scratching their heads. After forty years of age bachelors or widows stand before the rubicon of marriage and say: _Shall I go over or not?_ The larger number wait so long to decide that the forty years become fifty and then sixty. The limbs become weaker and the river grows wider by the inundations and floods of so many autumns, and thus the problem is resolved by want of resolution. Others instead, after a short and earnest meditation, exclaim: _No, I will not leap it._ And both do well, because although the calculation of probabilities is rarely applicable to moral problems, yet it proves that the combination of an old man and a young woman is a very frail one; at the least shock it is separated, as with fulminant mercury, chloride of azote, and all the infinite array of explosives; then comes a detonation, a disaster, more often a putrid and fetid dissolution. Some do not scratch their heads, but decide resolutely on the great step and leap. A difficult and perilous leap in which but few reach the other side unscathed. The majority of these intrepid individuals fall into the middle of the stream, which carries them away in its turbid and rough waters; others plunge directly into the mud up to the body and are fixed there, without being able to get out, a ridicule to others, a desperation to themselves. ⁂