Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/77

72 affair. Many a man and wife have parted, many still live unhappily together, some aware, but many unconscious, that the prime cause of all their bickerings and discontent is vampyrism on the part of one or the other. It causes fretfulness, moodiness, irritability; a feeling of repugnance arises toward the one who should be most dear; and eventually positive dislike takes the place of that tender affection which should ever grow more and more endearing between those who have given themselves to each other. This dislike becomes in many cases so strong that the parties cannot endure each other's presence; and separation becomes inevitable, neither, perhaps, conscious of the true cause. This is sometimes owing to an inferior development of amativeness, sometimes to debility, lack of vitality, the consequence of a feeble or shattered nervous system; and in either case the cure is to be found in less frequent contact, separate rooms, health, and mutual endeavor to correct the fault.

XXXIII. What vast hosts, what tremendous throngs of what are called husbands, and notoriously what almost infinite numbers of married women find home a real hell on a small scale instead, and all for want of mutuality, domesticity, sympathy, and, above all, reciprocity, that is the impartation and reception each by, to, and from the other, of the mysterious thing known as magnetism! And many such there be, who, realizing nothing but the worst kind of blanks in their lottery of life, actually long for death, or anything else, to mitigate or change the current horror of their lives. People, too, make great mistakes about this self-same mystic magnetism. They imagine it to be either all physical, or all mental, when, in fact, it is both; and this subtle fluid, or emanation, is the absolute connecting link between soul and body, matter and mind, and, ultimately, between man and the Deity. Thus in a few lines is solved a mystery which has puzzled the world for centuries,—that of the subtle something which was, and is, the connecting link between the two. There is a magnetism or effluence of soul, arising in, and flowing forth from, the persons of either sex, who are, by nature, endowed with large, open, free, sensitive, generous souls; and this sphere is deeply charged with mind, love, and all else that