It's sheer sentimentality, I suppose.
I can't be friendly with a woman without drifting into mawkish
tenderness--there's the simple truth. If I had married happily, I don't
think I should have been tempted to go about philandering. The society of a
wife I loved and respected would be sufficient. But there's that need in
me--the incessant hunger for a woman's sympathy and affection. Such a
hideous mistake as mine when I married would have made a cynic of most men;
upon me the lesson has been utterly thrown away. I mean that, though I can
talk of women rationally enough with a friend, I am at their mercy when
alone with them--at the mercy of the silliest, vulgarest creature. After
all, isn't it very much the same with men in general? The average man--how
does he come to marry? Do you think he deliberately selects? Does he fall
in love, in the strict sense of the phrase, with that one particular girl?
No; it comes about by chance--by the drifting force of circumstances. Not
one man in ten thousand, when he thinks of marriage, waits for the ideal
wife--for the woman who makes capture of his soul or even of his senses.
Men marry without passion. Most of us have a very small circle for choice;
the hazard of everyday life throws us into contact with this girl or that,
and presently we begin to feel either that we have compromised ourselves,
or that we might as well save trouble and settle down as soon as possible,
and the girl at hand will do as well as another.
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