not the concern of other people.  No one can fail in love, no one can take on himself so great a responsibility and fail to fulfil it, without all of us being concerned.  Humanity is solidaire.  The community is and must be concerned in the love of men and women in marriage.  But what should be the nature of that concern?  What should we—­the community—­hold up as the right standard of sex-relationship, and what methods should we use to impose it on others?  I think you will have gathered from what I have said already that, to my mind, marriage should be a union that looks forward to being permanent, faithful, monogamous.  It should be the expression of a union of spirit so perfect that the union of the bodies of those who love follows as a kind of natural necessity.  It should be the sacrament of love, “the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”  And something of this perfection is to be found in many marriages that seem (and are) far from complete.  I often hear of the lives of married people where there has been very much to overcome, where perhaps the marriage has been entered into in ignorance and error; where the passion that brought the two together has been very evanescent; where it has soon become evident that their temperaments do not “fit”; where it might easily be said that they were not really “married” at all:  yet there has been in these two such a stubborn loyalty to responsibilities undertaken, such a magnificent sense of faithfulness, such a determination to make the best out of what they have rather lightly undertaken; sometimes even only on one side, there has been such faith, such honour, such loyalty, such a refusal to admit a final failure, that a relationship poor in promise has become beautiful and sacred.  In face of such loyalty, the theory that sex-relationships can rightly be brief, evanescent, thrown aside as soon as passion has gone, seems to me very cheap and shoddy, very unworthy of human beings.  Marriage should be all that—­shall I say?—­the Brownings made of it.  But when it is not, there is still often much that is left.  Men and women, you cannot enter into one another’s lives in this deep and intimate way and go on your way as though nothing had happened.  You cannot tear asunder people so united without bleeding.  You cannot make a failure of it without immeasurable loss.

  “How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways. 
  I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
  My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
  For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. 
  I love thee to the level of everyday’s
  Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.”