"What is the matter with it?" he demanded savagely, aloud, in his room.
He considered marriage--isolated for that purpose--as a social
contract, the best possible solving of a number of interrelated needs
and instincts; and, practical and grey, it recommended itself to his
reason; it successfully disposed of the difficulties of property, the
birth and education of children, and of society. It was a sane,
dignified, way to live with a woman; and it secured so much.
Undoubtedly, on that count, marriage couldn't be bettered. As it was,
it satisfied the vast majority of men and women: against the bulk of
human life Fanny and he, with their friends, were inconsiderable. But
the number of men who struggled above the common level was hardly
greater; and he and his opinions were of that preferable minority. The
freedom of money, the opportunities of leisure, always led directly
away from what were called the indispensable virtues.
Men--he returned to the Eastlake streets on Saturday night--except
those lost in the monomania of a dream, didn't want to work, they
didn't even wish to be virtuous. They turned continually to the bypaths
of pleasure, that self-delusion and forgetfulness of drink. Yes,
released from the tyrannies of poverty, they flung themselves into a
swift spending. The poor were more securely married than the rich, the
dull than the imaginative--married, he meant, in the sense of a forged
bond, a stockade.
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