This task, it may finally be added, is always an adventure.  However well organised the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.  We may smile, therefore, when it is remarked that the future developments of the home are risky.  Birds in the air and fishes in the sea, quite as much as our own ancestors on the earth, have always found life full of risks.  It was the greatest risk of all when they insisted on continuing on the old outworn ways and so became extinct.  If the home is an experiment and a risky experiment, one can only say that life is always like that.  We have to see to it that in this central experiment, on which our happiness so largely depends, all our finest qualities are mobilised.  Even the smallest homes under the new conditions cannot be built to last with small minds and small hearts.  Indeed the discipline of the home demands not only the best intellectual qualities that are available, but often involves—­and in men as well as in women—­a spiritual training fit to make sweeter and more generous saints than any cloister.  The greater the freedom, the more complete the equality of husband and wife, the greater the possibilities of discipline and development.  In view of the rigidities and injustices of the law, many couples nowadays dispense with legal marriage, and form their own private contract; that method has sometimes proved more favourable to the fidelity and permanence of love than external compulsion; it assists the husband to remain the lover, and it is often the lover more than the husband that the modern woman needs; but it has always to be remembered that in the present condition of law and social opinion a slur is cast on the children of such unions.  No doubt, however, marriage and the home will undergo modifications, which will tend to make these ancient institutions a little more flexible and to permit a greater degree of variation to meet special circumstances.  We can occupy ourselves with no more essential task, whether as regards ourselves or the race, than to make more beautiful the House of Life for the dwelling of Love.

CHAPTER V

THE LOVE-RIGHTS OF WOMEN

What is the part of woman, one is sometimes asked, in the sex act?  Must it be the wife’s concern in the marital embrace to sacrifice her own wishes from a sense of love and duty towards her husband?  Or is the wife entitled to an equal mutual interest and joy in this act with her husband?  It seems a simple problem.  In so fundamental a relationship, which goes back to the beginning of sex in the dawn of life, it might appear that we could leave Nature to decide.  Yet it is not so.  Throughout the history of civilisation, wherever we can trace the feelings and ideas which have prevailed on this matter and the resultant conduct, the problem has existed, often to produce discord, conflict, and misery.  The problem still exists to-day and with as important results as in the past.