Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/29

24 young thing to have one single taste or desire in common with the old dotard she calls husband.

She cannot absorb, reciprocate or assimilate him, or aught pertaining to him, magnetically, or in any other way; and she even loathes the food he dotes on, and the liquids he consumes to keep his unnatural fever up.

The magnetic auras issuant from them are unlike, and to her repellant, after a time, if not at once. He consumes, absorbs, and assimilates the totality of her vital life, and at length she dies for sheer want of that whereof he robs her. But a still stronger protest is here: it is found in the well-known fact that the old and coarse magnetism of the man poisons both the body and soul of the young girl; seals up the fountains of her youth and responsive power; shuts the door of amative joy in her face; robs her of her rights as wife; suggests evil thoughts to her mind, and paves the way for her to yield heart and all else to whoever near her own age tries to win her, by giving her a kind of love she needs, and which is proper for one of her tender years.

Where the disparity is even twenty years it is infinitely far too great. Ten years' difference is a deal too much, and five the limit, save in the case of bloodless girls and very magnetic men; in which union the female thrives on the fresh vitality of the man. But, even in such cases, she must be blonde, and he the opposite—always; for if the reverse happens, she's a doomed woman, and he a physical imbecile, in five years' time at the utmost. In the case of ordinary December and May marriages he robs her of life; she gestates horror instead of affection; for in natural marriage souls blend and interfuse more or less perfectly after a time; and those who have lived unhappy lives often find out how well they loved at heart, after death comes tapping at the gate, if not before. Then it is: "Who'd have thought it?" but too late! Such antipodes cannot blend, because the girl is peach-downy, supple, gay, lithe and lightsome, but the man lithy, that is, limy, calcareous; and they cannot, will not mingle in any more intimate relations than that of father and daughter.

Some people have young souls in old bodies, in which case things