as we do of each other; and yet you contract indissoluble marriages, and form life-partnerships with beings who may be perfectly unsuitable, physically and morally. And then you talk of the sanctity of marriage, and consider it a heinous offence even to think of dissolving the perhaps irksome bond by which you have bound yourselves to one another. No wonder that complaints are so frequent among you of unhappy marriages, and that your satirists find a constant theme for their unpleasant wit in the miseries of married life. To us it seems extraordinary that your marriages so often turn out the reverse of what we would naturally expect them to be, and that contented and even happy couples are produced by such unlikely means."
It may easily be imagined how profoundly I was shocked at hearing such sentiments, so utterly at variance with all that I had been taught at home. But I felt some relief for the grief of my great disappointment when I reflected that, without doubt, the sentiments expressed by my transcendental friend were entertained by Lily also, and I felt it impossible that I could have led a happy life with a young creature, however charming in other respects, whose ideas were evidently so diametrically opposed to everything my education had led me to believe right and proper. I could not let him go without telling him how entirely I differed from him.
"Your notions respecting our English marriages," I said, "are almost entirely wrong. It is true that couples often find themselves but ill matched. But the knowledge that they have made a life-contract, if they have common sense and amiability, leads them to accommodate themselves to one another, to overlook
