Page:The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace, and Other Tales (London, Macmillan, 1922).djvu/37

 to it—of generations wedded, that is, to the young speculative exchange of intimate vows—as to the palladium of their liberties. What had struck me nevertheless was that, in common with a hundred other native traditions and practices, it had suffered from the attitude of poets and statisticians banded alike to display it as quite devoid of attendant signs or appreciable effects. From far back a more perverse student, doubtless, of the human scene in general had ventured to suspect in it some at least of the properties of presentable truth: so hard it appeared to belleve that the number of a young lady's accepted lovers wouldn't in some degree determine the mixture of the elements in the young lady's consciousness and have much to "say," in one way and another, to the young lady's general case. What it might have to say (of most interest to poet and moralist) was certainly meanwhile no matter for a priori judgement—it might have to say but the most charming, the most thrilling things in the world; this, however, was exactly the field for dramatic analysis, no such fine quantities being ever determinable till they have with due intelligence been "gone into." "Dramatise, dramatise!" one had, in fine, before the so signal appearance, said to one's self: then, and not sooner, would one see.

By the same token and the same process would one arrive at a similar profit on the score of that other almost equally prized social provision—which has indeed received more critical attention—the unrestricted freedom of re-marriage in the lifetime of the parties, the unhampered ease of rupture and repudiation for each. On this ground, as I say, the fond interpreter of life has had, wherever we observe him, the acute appeal apparently enough in his ears; and it was to reach me in the present connexion but as a source of sound re-enforcement to my possibly xxxi