upon her so, and nine years after your marriage she will inspire in you the same poetical feeling as she did when she was a bride—no, more poetical, more ideal, in the proper sense of the word. Acknowledge her liberty as openly and formally and without any circumlocutions, just as you acknowledge the freedom of your friends, to feel or not to feel friendship towards you, and then in ten years, in twenty years, after your wedding, you will be as much in love with her as when you were a bridegroom. So live husbands and wives of the new dispensation. It is much to be desired. And for that very reason, that they are honest towards each other, they love each other ten years after marriage more warmly and poetically than on the wedding-day, and just for the very reason that during these ten years neither he nor she gave each other a dissembling kiss or said one hypocritical word. "A lie has never passed his lips," was said about somebody in a certain book; "There is no hypocrisy in his heart" was said about somebody, maybe in the very same book. They read the book and think, "What a wonderful moral height is ascribed to him!" When they wrote the book they thought, "Here we are describing a man who will fill every one with surprise." They know not who wrote the book, do not realize who is going to read it; but the people of the new dispensation do not receive among the number of their acquaintances anybody who does not possess such a soul, and they have no lack of such a soul, and they have no lack of such acquaintance, and they look upon their acquaintances as nothing more than people of the new dispensation, good, but ordinary people.
One thing calls for pity: at the present time, to every one man of the new dispensation there are a dozen or more antediluvians. This, however, is natural. In an antediluvian world you expect an antediluvian population.
XIV.
"And so here we have been living together three years" (before, it used to be said a year, two years, and later it will be said four years, and so on), "and yet we are still like lovers, who see each other rarely and secretly. Where did people get the idea that love grows weak, when there is
