can be nothing more hideous—more like a foretaste of hell itself—than the life position of a man and woman who have been hustled into matrimony, and who, when the wedding fuss is over and the feminine pictorial papers have done gushing about the millinery of the occasion, find themselves alone together, without a single sympathy in common, with nothing but the chink of gold and the rustle of the bank-notes for their heart music, and with a barrier of steadily increasing repulsion and disgust rising between them every day.
We have seen something of such a picture in Marie Corelli's character of "Sybil Elton"; that it is no more nor less than a crime to enter upon marriage without that mutual supreme attraction and deep love which makes the union sacred, may be, in fact, allowed. The question is, how to avoid such evils? Marie Corelli gives the answer in this advice: "In a woman's life one love should suffice. She cannot, constituted as she is, honestly give herself to more than one man. And she should be certain—absolutely, sacredly, solemnly certain, that one man is indeed her preelected lover, her chosen mate; that never could she care for any other hand than his to caress her beauty, never for any other kiss than his to rest upon her lips, and that without him life is but a half-circle waiting completion.
