Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/44

 though without legal status, was "chaste"; but that is a paradox and a challenge to our idea.

Let us take one more case in this group: Mr. J. D. Beresford with the Jacob Stahl trilogy. In this rather drab yet impressive work, one finds the "emancipative" ideas of Mr. Wells assimilated by a much less buoyant nature. Jacob muddles into a bad marriage with an unquestionably unsuitable person, from whom he separates, though he is not divorced. He falls in love with one of the keepers of his lodging-house and asks her to live with him without legal sanction till his wife shall die. After months of consideration she freely and resolutely joins him. From that point, Mr. Beresford exerts himself to prove that their relation is just as grave and permanent and full of labor and anxiety and humdrum and gray days as marriage itself. I suspect there is a kind of grim truthfulness in the relation of this adventure. It reminds one, in the third volume, of George Eliot and of accounts given by sundry visitors of the slightly dreary decorum of her ménage. There is no expectation of ecstasy on the part of either of the adventurers. They merely look, outside marriage, for the alleviations of the ultimate human solitude afforded by a satisfac-