Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/28

Rh true. If it were possible for two people, one sixty, the other sixteen, to fully and mutually love each other, then the girl would help the man, and the man increase the girl's recuperative power. But, happily, girls of sixteen can't love sixty, nohow you can fix it. I knew a man in New York State, who literally drove his daughter, a thin, pale, waxen child of sixteen, into a hated marriage of sixty-five or thereabouts. Two years afterwards, a child was buried in the West, and four weeks afterwards the father bore his daughter's body to bury it and his happiness together in one grave on the hillside.

Were a man of that age to use means to thus get a daughter of mine, say twenty-live years ago, when I was young, I think there'd have been a third-class funeral in that town; for I regard it as a crime even worse than some sorts of murder; and here are my reasons why: It is safe to say, where occasionally the young girl marries an old man, and good results follow, that such cases are extraordinary, and altogether exceptional to an almost universal rule; because the old man's motive is to prolong his miserable existence at the expense of a fresh young life; and of course his "love!" is but a selfish, mean, self-preservative instinct; while the girl's love is one of advantage, either money-wise or from gratitude, and therefore not real love at all; because in the very nature of things she can but feel an utter disgust, an awful and appalling horror and loathing at the bare thought, much less the sickening ordeal of fact.

Happiness is out of the question, and the cases exceedingly rare where they produce anything but misery. Nearly every one will at once see many of the reasons why; but there are some others not quite so self-apparent, and here they are. In marriage and its offices there must be a reciprocal play of electric and magnetic forces; for unless mutual, there's disaster just ahead, and sunken rocks all around, upon which that ship of wedlock is sure, sooner or later, to run aground; and in the wreck that follows some one is sure to be lost—and that some one is a young wife, tired of an old, besotted, worn-out man!

The great disparity of years, magnetism, vitality and life-force between such an ill-starred couple renders it utterly impossible for the