“I want the truth,” she said; so that I answered very gravely: “When the passion is passed; when the glory and the wonder of Desire—Nature’s eternal ritual of marriage, solemnising, sanctifying it to her commands—is ended; when, sooner or later, some grey dawn finds you wandering bewildered in once familiar places, seeking vainly the lost palace of youth’s dreams; when Love’s frenzy is faded, like the fragrance of the blossom, like the splendour of the dawn; there will remain to you, just what was there before—no more, no less. If passion was all you had to give to one another, God help you. You have had your hour of madness. It is finished. If greed of praise and worship was your price—well, you have had your payment. The bargain is complete. If mere hope to be made happy was your lure, one pities you. We do not make each other happy. Happiness is the gift of the gods, not of man. The secret lies within you, not without. What remains to you will depend not upon what you _thought_, but upon what you _are_. If behind the lover there was the man—behind the impossible goddess of his love-sick brain some honest, human woman, then life lies not behind you, but before you. “Life is giving, not getting. That is the mistake we most of us set out with. It is the work that is the joy, not the wages; the game, not the score. The lover’s delight is to yield, not to claim. The crown of motherhood is pain. To serve the State at cost of ease and leisure; to spend his thought and labour upon a hundred schemes, is the man’s ambition. Life is doing, not having. It is to gain the peak the climber strives, not to possess it. Fools marry thinking what they are going to get out of it: good store of joys and pleasure, opportunities for self-indulgence, eternal soft caresses—the wages of the wanton. The rewards of marriage are toil, duty, responsibility—manhood, womanhood. Love’s baby talk you will have outgrown. You will no longer be his ‘Goddess,’ ‘Angel,’ ‘Popsy Wopsy,’ ‘Queen of his heart.’ There are finer names than these: wife, mother, priestess in the temple of humanity. Marriage is renunciation, the sacrifice of Self upon the altar of the race. ‘A trick of Nature’ you call it. Perhaps. But a trick of Nature compelling you to surrender yourself to the purposes of God.” I fancy we must have sat in silence for quite a long while; for the moon, creeping upward past the wood, had flooded the fields again with light before Robina spoke. “Then all love is needless,” she said, “we could do better without it, choose with more discretion. If it is only something that worries us for a little while and then passes, what is the sense of it?”