Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/90

 civilized and rational people. To him these considerations are so elementary and so familiar that he acts upon them spontaneously."

"Then you would admit," I suggested, a little petulantly, "that what a man is, after he is a vestryman, an officer in the militia, and a property-holder, may have a certain remote bearing on—on the felicity of a marriage, if you think that of any importance?"

"Of course I think that of importance," responded Cornelia. "Don't be foolish. I am discussing the conditions in which felicity begins to be possible. You recall what Henry James says so beautifully: 'The object of money is to enable one to forget it.' In the whole course of my life, I believe I was never before hectored into saying so flatly what the prerequisites of a decent marriage are. But you and your novelist friends—you realists, as you call yourselves—have filled the world with the glorification of merely instinctive and utterly irrational 'matings,' or with childish sentimentality about them; so that now, when I talk with Dorothy about suitable and unsuitable marriages, I find myself obliged to reconstruct for her the very rudiments of common-sense."

I do not consider Cornelia subtle, but sometimes