AUGUST 439 



■whole souls — past, present and to come — thinking that, 

 because the man enjoys it and shows sympathy, he 

 understands ; but he does not a bit, and quickly forgets 

 all she has told him. One reason why the early months 

 of marriage are so often the least happy is that the two 

 individuals expect each to understand the other. Mr. 

 Lecky somewhere puts it that the art of a politician in a 

 great measure is that of skilful compromise, and that 

 someone whose name I forget 'was ever ready with the 

 offer of a golden bridge or via media in order to reconcile 

 effectually differences of opinion.' Does not this wisdom 

 equally extend to married, and indeed to all family life ? 

 If one of the two is always offering this golden bridge, 

 I do not see how things can go very far wrong. I have 

 known many married people of all ages — some older, 

 some contemporary, and some younger — and my aston- 

 ishment is that, on the whole, so few marriages have been 

 real failures. What gives the impression of failure to 

 the young is that they often judge of the happiness or 

 unhappiness of married life from the generation of their 

 parents. When people have been married for eighteen 

 or twenty years, the conditions of their lives are entirely 

 different from what they were in earlier years. Even if 

 mutual devotion is still there, the display of it is sub- 

 dued, and children instinctively assume that neither their 

 parents nor their parents' friends were ever in love with 

 each other. Also it is true that this middle life is fre- 

 quently the most trying time in the marriage tie. Early 

 love is over, time has developed the differences of the 

 two individuals, and they have not yet attained to the 

 more reasonable calm that often supervenes in later 

 years. And yet this half-way time is just what is pre- 

 sented to the critical eyes of the young as they are 

 growing up, 



There is a love which never tries to call itself by any 



