To reply to these objections that there is a “love” that transcends all these difficulties, may sound pleasant and charming and good-natured, but it is hardly candid. For as I have pointed out above, the possibility of the existence of this rare kind of love does not justify us in making marriage a lie for the bulk of mankind. (B) Furthermore, monogamic marriage makes no allowance for the fact that human courtship and the subsequent union of the sexes to which it leads, partakes essentially of the nature of an adventure. In fact, to a large number of people in these dull and ordered days it is the only adventure of their lives. In many of its aspects it is reminiscent of the qualities of the chase, and it would be unscientific not to allow for this smack of venery in the preliminaries which precede _venery_. That mutual attraction which ultimately leads to mutual capitulation is full of the excitement, the doubt, the anxiety and the final triumph of the huntsman. When the quarry is a positive virgin and her pursuer a positive man, even the fascination of fear is added—fear of the intensity of the passion awakened—to complete the similitude of the experience to the circumstances of the chase. Beside this, however, the steady hum-drum routine of married life can at best only be a flat parody—particularly married life in modern civilization, witnessed, as it is, by innumerable stuffy relatives, marred by imperfect health, supported by tired and irascible nerves, and depressed by the consciousness that it must last a lifetime. Nor can it be said that the divine gifts of imagination and artistic creativeness tend to mitigate the solemn boredom and exasperation that overtake the parties to such a legal union; on the contrary, they but enhance its horrors: behold the unhappy married lives of most men of genius, Dickens, Carlyle, Byron, and the philosophic Socrates!