so jealous and implacable that the least step from
the straight path means exposure and ruin, it is almost
impossible by any extravagance of misconduct to provoke
society to relax its steady pretence of blindness,
unless you do one or both of two fatal things.
One is to get into the newspapers; and the other is
to confess. If you confess misconduct to respectable
men or women, they must either disown you or become
virtually your accomplices: that is why they are
so angry with you for confessing. If you get
into the papers, the pretence of not knowing becomes
impossible. But it is hardly too much to say that
if you avoid these two perils, you can do anything
you like, as far as your neighbors are concerned.
And since we can hardly flatter ourselves that this
is the effect of charity, it is difficult not to suspect
that our extraordinary forbearance in the matter of
stone throwing is that suggested in the well-known
parable of the women taken in adultery which some early
free-thinker slipped into the Gospel of St John:
namely, that we all live in glass houses. We
may take it, then, that the ideal husband and the
ideal wife are no more real human beings than the
cherubim. Possibly the great majority keeps its
marriage vows in the technical divorce court sense.
No husband or wife yet born keeps them or ever can
keep them in the ideal sense.
The truth which people seem to overlook in this matter
is that the marriage ceremony is quite useless as
a magic spell for changing in an instant the nature
of the relations of two human beings to one another.
If a man marries a woman after three weeks acquaintance,
and the day after meets a woman he has known for twenty
years, he finds, sometimes to his own irrational surprise
and his wife’s equally irrational indignation,
that his wife is a stranger to him, and the other
woman an old friend. Also, there is no hocus
pocus that can possibly be devized with rings and
veils and vows and benedictions that can fix either
a man’s or woman’s affection for twenty
minutes, much less twenty years. Even the most
affectionate couples must have moments during which
they are far more conscious of one another’s
faults than of one another’s attractions.
There are couples who dislike one another furiously
for several hours at a time; there are couples who
dislike one another permanently; and there are couples
who never dislike one another; but these last are
people who are incapable of disliking anybody.
If they do not quarrel, it is not because they are
married, but because they are not quarrelsome.
The people who are quarrelsome quarrel with their
husbands and wives just as easily as with their servants
and relatives and acquaintances: marriage makes
no difference. Those who talk and write and legislate
as if all this could be prevented by making solemn
vows that it shall not happen, are either insincere,
insane, or hopelessly stupid. There is some sense
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