Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/99

 the first place, there are no perfect husbands, and there is probably only one perfect wife. In the second place, happiness is in neither wives nor husbands, but only in the relation between. In the third place, people who are unhappy in marriage are so, usually, because they don't know how to give themselves to each other. In the fourth place,—it's four now,—that unhappy ignorance is chiefly due to erroneous conceptions of the self."

"Just what do you mean by the self?" she said. "My metaphysical brains are weak."

"Well, the traditional, romantic, and generally popular conception is, that the self is a very deep and precious mystery of 'the buried life,' an elusive being hidden away inside,—always inside,—in a secret garden of the personality, where it murmurs to itself the most delightful and ineffable secrets, which can be communicated to any other self only in a mystical physical fusion of selves—or confusion of selves."

"Yes," said Cornelia, "I understand that. It is something like the religious or sacramental theory of marriage, isn't it?"

"Something like some people's notion of it," I replied. "But please follow this argument. Under the illusion that the self is such a being, and only