CHAP: IX. HARRIET AND LOVAT AT SEA IN MARRIAGE
When a sincere man marries a wife, he has one or two courses open to him, which he can pursue with that wife. He can propose to himself to be (a) the lord and master who is honoured and obeyed, (b) the perfect lover, (c) the true friend and companion. Of these (a) is now rather out of date. The lord and master has been proved, by most women quite satisfactorily, to be no more than a grown-up child, and his arrogance is to be tolerated just as a little boy's arrogance is tolerated, because it is rather amusing, and up to a certain point becoming. The case of (b), the perfect lover, is the crux of all ideal marriage to-day. But alas, not even the lord and master turns out such a fiasco as does the perfect lover, ninety-nine times out of a hundred. The perfect-lover marriage ends usually in a quite ghastly anti-climax, divorce and horrors and the basest vituperation. Alas for the fact, as compared with the ideal. A marriage of the perfect-lover type is bound either to end in catastrophe, or to slide away towards (a) or (c). It must either revert to a mild form of the lord-and-master marriage, and a wise woman, who knows the sickeningness of catastrophes and the ridiculous futility of second shots at the perfect-love paradise, often wisely pushes the marriage back gradually into one of the little bays or creeks of this Pacific ocean of marriage, lord-and-masterdom. Not that either party really believes in the lordship of man. But you've got to get into still water some time or other. The perfect-love business inevitably turns out to be a wildly stormy strait, like the Straits of Magellan, where two fierce and opposing currents meet and there is the devil of a business trying to keep the bark of marriage, with the flag of perfect-love at the mast, from dashing on a rock or foundering in the heavy seas. Two fierce and opposing currents meet in the narrows of perfect love. They may meet in blue and perfect weather, when the albatross hovers in the great sky like a permanent benediction, and the sea shimmers a second heaven. But
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