may be, avoided, as indelicate and improper, all allusion to questions so vital to the life and happiness of his newly-wedded wife. All she has to rest upon is the indefinite assurance, given before God and man, that he will cherish, protect and care for her. _Why_ he promised to protect and care for her, whether as a mere means of sensual gratification, or for holier and more exalted purposes, she has no assurance. Not one word, it may be, has he ever spoken to her respecting the motives that have prompted him to seek her as a wife. O, woman! woman! how dare you enter into such a relation with a man, without knowing what he expects of you? The wife, in such a situation, cannot cherish loving and tender thoughts of her husband when absent, nor receive his caresses with rapture when present. She bears in herself the result of the wrong he has inflicted on her. It is ever present to her thoughts and emotions. She cannot escape from it but by an outrage on herself and child; and as, in her moments of solitary suffering and anguish, she reflects on her condition, and why she must endure them, how can she regard the author of them with loving respect? The sense of the wrong done her is ever present,—can she tenderly cherish the wrong-doer, especially when he continues to demand of her a constant renewal of the relation in which her present afflictions and forebodings of future sorrows originated? She cannot; for he, by inflicting on her a maternity which her own soul cannot sanction, and from which, perhaps, she shrinks with horror, has rendered himself unworthy of her love and respect. It is in vain to urge a woman thus situated to love and honor her husband. At no command of God or man can she, as a wife, love and cherish him. Indeed, no wife can love her husband at the word of command. If she loves him at all, it is because she must, not because she is ordered to do it. Her love will flow out to him as a necessity of her being, not by the command of a third party. If he has no power to call it out and concentrate it on himself, it will not go out to him. Nothing can force it out. She is not to blame if she does not love him. She gives him all he has power to awaken and call out,—all the love he has power to take; more he has no right to ask, more she cannot give. Her love for him will correspond to his lovableness in her eyes; he will seek to render himself lovable to her, just in proportion to the value he sets on her love. Expect no love from a woman because she is your legal wife. The legal bond can impose on her no obligation to love you; and if it did, she cannot love you, if your person and your passion become disgusting to her.