Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/102

Rh twenty-three thousand gallons a day. The average surface of the air-cells of your lungs supposing them to he spread out. exceeds twenty thousand square inches. The weight of your brain is three pounds. In the average American man it will weigh about eight ounces more. Your nerves exceed ten millions in number. Your skin is composed of three layers, and varied from one-fourth to one-eighth of an inch in thickness. The area of your skin is about one thousand seven hundred square inches, and you arc subjected to an atmospheric pressure of fifteen pounds to the square inch. Each square inch of your skin contains three thousand sweating tubes, or respiratory pores, each of which may be likened to a little drain-tile one-fourth of an inch long, making the aggregate length of the entire surface of your body of two hundred and one thousand three hundred and sixty-five feet, or a tile-ditch for draining the body almost forty miles long.

Now in any act which requires more than a normal drain, every atom of this magnificent machine is injured, and its life jeoparded. But in sexism, true and normal, and false and perverted ones also, yield up a portion of the life of every particle of the being; also when we sleep with nervous or organic incompatibles. In righteous conjugation what one gives out is instantly replaced by the other, and perfect rest and equilibrium follow the natural shock. But in the false rites, what of life goes out, stays out. There is no return in kind; no change given for the golden coin of life recklessly thrown on the counters of lust!

LV. The bitterest matrimonial discontents arise from the half-unconscious misconception that happiness, not growth, is the end of marriage, and the forgetfulness that human nature is universal. It is impossible for two people thoroughly to know each other until they have been tested by the exigencies of a united life. If then a radical antagonism of temperament is developed, which makes the union oppressive, why should the discordant souls be kept together? What is to be gained by holding them in the bonds of hatred? The remedy cannot be found in the abolition of the civil contract of marriage, leaving them bee to repeat again and again the disastrous experiment, because that has been tried and failed. Now it seems