The secret lies within you, not
without. What remains to you will depend not upon what you THOUGHT,
but upon what you ARE. If behind the lover there was the man--behind
the impossible goddess of his love-sick brain some honest, human
woman, then life lies not behind you, but before you.
"Life is giving, not getting. That is the mistake we most of us set
out with. It is the work that is the joy, not the wages; the game,
not the score. The lover's delight is to yield, not to claim. The
crown of motherhood is pain. To serve the State at cost of ease and
leisure; to spend his thought and labour upon a hundred schemes, is
the man's ambition. Life is doing, not having. It is to gain the
peak the climber strives, not to possess it. Fools marry thinking
what they are going to get out of it: good store of joys and
pleasure, opportunities for self-indulgence, eternal soft caresses--
the wages of the wanton. The rewards of marriage are toil, duty,
responsibility--manhood, womanhood. Love's baby talk you will have
outgrown. You will no longer be his 'Goddess,' 'Angel,' 'Popsy
Wopsy,' 'Queen of his heart.' There are finer names than these:
wife, mother, priestess in the temple of humanity. Marriage is
renunciation, the sacrifice of Self upon the altar of the race. 'A
trick of Nature' you call it. Perhaps. But a trick of Nature
compelling you to surrender yourself to the purposes of God.
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