A question like this can be decided only by the experience of the race. Some will make love the end and aim of life, and others will make it the means to other ends, and we shall see which kind of people achieve the best results, which kind are the most useful, the most dignified, the most original and vital. I have seen a great many young people try the experiment of "free love," and I have seen some get enough of it and quit; I could name among these half a dozen of our younger novelists. I know others who are still in it--and I watch their lives and find them to be restless, jealous, egotistical and idle. My defense of monogamy is based upon the fact that I have never known any happy or successful "free lovers." Of course, I know some noble and sincere people who do not believe in the marriage contract, and refuse to be bound by law; but these people are as monogamous as I am, even more tightly bound by honor than if they were duly married. It seems to be in the very nature of true and sincere love to imagine permanence, to desire it and to pledge it. If you aren't that much in love, you aren't really in love at all, and you had better content yourself with strolling together and chatting together and dining together and playing music together. So many pleasant ways there are in which men and women can enjoy each other's company without entering upon the sacred intimacy of sex! You can learn to take sex lightly, of course, but if you do so, you reduce by so much the chances that true and deep love will ever come to you; for true and deep love requires some patience, some reverence, some tending at a shrine. The animals mate quickly and get it over with; but the great discoveries about love, and the possibilities of the human soul in love, have come because men and women have been willing to make sacrifices for it, to take it seriously--and more especially to take seriously the beloved person, the rights and needs and virtues of that person. From the lives of such we learn that love is nature's device for taking us out of ourselves, and making us truly social creatures. Early in my life as a writer I undertook to answer Gertrude Atherton, in her glorification of the sex-corruptions of capitalist society. She indicted American literature for its "bourgeois" qualities--among these the fact that American authors had a prejudice in favor of living with their own wives. Mrs. Atherton set forth the joys of sex promiscuity as they are understood by European artists, and I ventured in replying to remark that "one woman can be more to a man than a dozen can possibly be." That sounds like a paradox, but it is really a profound truth, and the person who does not understand it has missed the best there is in the sex relation. There is a limit to the things of the body, but to those of the mind and spirit there is no limit, and so there is no reason why true love should ever fall prey to boredom and satiety. CHAPTER XLV THE PROBLEM OF JEALOUSY