Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/63

58 Why? Because they have a little more care; a greater amount of give and take, without being mad about it, and make more strenuous endeavors to please each other—and that's just it! for as soon as people do that, they cease fretting, scolding, fuming, worrying, complaining and borrowing trouble; and therefore cease to waste their magnetisms, consequently the honey bubbles up again and life's vinegar leaks out! Now, owing to these causes, married people are not as they should be,—the happiest beings on earth; far from it; the youths and maidens discount them largely on the general average; and you can almost always tell a married pair wherever you clap eyes on them; for it's heads up! and a smirk or smile to every one else but each other. Not so with unwedded lovers. The former lean away from each other, and gaze askant; the latter lean to each other and drink in delicious draughts of ecstasy from each other's eyes. Now the man who accounts for this state of things on the hypothesis that the one is passion appeased, the other only anticipatory, is a fool, besides being a selfish knave. The true reading is: Magnetic exhaustion in one case—magnetic reciprocity in the other. What magnetism is I will tell you presently; suffice it at this stage to record its existence, and to note such facts as above adduced. I have already, in a previous paragraph of this section, indicated, generally, by suggestion, the cure for this state of affairs. Briefly, they are to utterly put a stop to all sources of magnetic depletion. Keep cool everywhere, under all provocations and circumstances. Eat, drink, sleep well, and whatever you do, make a business of it. When you work, with hands or brain, do it with a will; but don't work all the time. When the day's labor is done, forget all about it, and devote at least two hours of the evening to social chat, talk, visiting, or receiving visitors; walk out; read, listen to music, and persistently have your two, or even one hour a day, free from sordid strife and worldly care. Hard to do it at first in these grab-all days, wherein, as the sailor said, "People eat hard, work hard, fare hard, sleep hard, have a hard time generally through this life, at length dying hard, and going to perdition at last," which the sceptical old salt said was "particularly derned hard!"

A pint of water contains latent force enough to blow a town