It was universally agreed that no idea could be more absurd, less practical, more detestable, more immoral even. Marriage was a transaction, an ‘establishment,’ a business partnership, a grave material union of interests, rank, and social responsibilities, sanctified by the close personal association of the partners. To insinuate an idea of pleasure was to rob it of its noble and honourable character, and to drag it down into the mire of sensuality. To mingle with it a physical suggestion was to degrade it; to mingle with it love, the absolute, great enthusiasms of heart or intellect, was to lay up for oneself disasters, or at least certain disappointment. “Love-matches turn out badly quite as often as arranged marriages.” A romance lasts a week, the reality for a lifetime. No passion can survive the humdrum, the monotony, the deadweight of matrimonial experience: and what marriage can hold out against passion? Heart freedom, the storms, raptures, revulsions to be anticipated on all sides—what amalgamation is possible between these and the peaceful domestic life which is looked-to to furnish forth a very solid, united, and well-ordered existence? A certain equality is the rule of passion: what it demands is a perfect union between two persons who are mutually attracted and whom there is nothing to keep apart. What would become of married life under these conditions, without some directing authority, without one to give law to the other? In regard to marriage, the time-honoured principle, rigorous though protective, was this: the husband ought always to take the helm, imbecile, madman or rake though he be: woman is born to obey, man to command. Wedlock then is good solid household bread, not by any means cakes and ale. It is the modest squat suburban villa in which you eat and sleep: passion is a church-spire piercing the sky—the spire we see high above our smoky roofs, whence on Sundays and festivals our ears are greeted with the sound of bells. To try to import passion into marriage is like trying to pack a cathedral into one’s bedroom. And so marriage is to retain its actual character as a simple, natural function of the physical life, like eating and drinking: the husband a domestic animal, presented to the woman by the usages of society, the accident of birth, and the terms of the bargain. There is no reason for choosing him except in so far as he fulfils these conditions. Do women choose their family affections? Do they select their father, brother, relatives? The husband also is a relative, a partner, to whom every possible duty is owing except that of love. The woman’s duty to him is to keep house for him, present him with children, nurse him in sickness, and regard his liberty as sacred.