The intellectual ideal seems to be that of a conversation on all the subjects you most care about, which should never lose its interest. Is it possible that two people should live together and talk to each other every day for twenty years without knowing each other's views too well for them to seem worth expressing or worth listening to? There are friends whom we know _too_ well, so that our talk with them has less of refreshment and entertainment than a conversation with the first intelligent stranger on the quarter-deck of the steamboat. It is evident that from the intellectual point of view this is the great danger of marriage. It may become dull, not because the mental force of either of the parties has declined, but because each has come to know so accurately beforehand what the other will say on any given topic, that inquiry is felt to be useless. This too perfect intimacy, which has ended many a friendship outside of marriage, may also terminate the intellectual life in matrimony itself. Let us not pass too lightly over this danger, for it is not to be denied. Unless carefully provided against, it will gradually extinguish the light that plays between the wedded intelligences as the electric light burns between two carbon points. I venture to suggest, however, that this evil may be counteracted by persons of some energy and originality. This is one of those very numerous cases in which an evil is sure to arrive if nothing is done to prevent it, yet in which the evil need not arrive when those whom it menaces are forewarned. To take an illustration intelligible in these days of steam-engines. We know that if the water is allowed to get very low in the boiler a destructive explosion will be the consequence; yet, since every stoker is aware of this, such explosions are not of frequent occurrence. That evil is continually approaching and yet continually averted by the exercise of human foresight. Let us suppose that a married couple are clearly aware that in the course of years their society is sure to become mutually uninteresting unless something is done to preserve the earlier zest of it. What is that something? That which an author does for the unknown multitude of his readers.