Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/49

44 both shall have become citizens of the country of disembodied souls. Now it often happens that people in whom this sort of love exists mistake its nature and significance; imagine that they were born for each other; and, so they are, but not for the life below. They marry, and, to their first surprise, and subsequent horror, discover that for all the purposes of matrimony one is oil, the other water, without a particle of mental lime to combine and fuse the two together, and thereby form a true kalsomate of soul.

So do I. But even a greater pity exists where, fired by the most ardent hopes, one or both find out that not a real tie of soul binds the twain together. Then comes the unveiling; and, my God, what an awful, horrible spectre stands frowning where each expected to behold and hold—she an Adonis, he a perfect Hebe!

When the mistake is made such parties marvel and wonder how on earth it can be so; and why the actual marriage produces effects so utterly foreign to their expectations and hopes. In the union of two such there is a compatibility of spirits to a great extent, but none whatever on the amative plane,—the sex of form; for the actual fact of marriage produces utter dissatisfaction to him, horror, pain, mental anguish, disease and lingering death to her. This generates discord and despair, general unhappiness, and is almost sure to drive the man to the house of the strange Woman,