Remember, however, that to be breakable is not the same as to be perishable.  Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years.  Such, it seemed, was the joy of man, either in elfland or on earth; the happiness depended on not doing something which you could at any moment do and which, very often, it was not obvious why you should not do.  Now, the point here is that to me this did not seem unjust.  If the miller’s third son said to the fairy, “Explain why I must not stand on my head in the fairy palace,” the other might fairly reply, “Well, if it comes to that, explain the fairy palace.”  If Cinderella says, “How is it that I must leave the ball at twelve?” her godmother might answer, “How is it that you are going there till twelve?” If I leave a man in my will ten talking elephants and a hundred winged horses, he cannot complain if the conditions partake of the slight eccentricity of the gift.  He must not look a winged horse in the mouth.  And it seemed to me that existence was itself so very eccentric a legacy that I could not complain of not understanding the limitations of the vision when I did not understand the vision they limited.  The frame was no stranger than the picture.  The veto might well be as wild as the vision; it might be as startling as the sun, as elusive as the waters, as fantastic and terrible as the towering trees.

For this reason (we may call it the fairy godmother philosophy) I never could join the young men of my time in feeling what they called the general sentiment of revolt.  I should have resisted, let us hope, any rules that were evil, and with these and their definition I shall deal in another chapter.  But I did not feel disposed to resist any rule merely because it was mysterious.  Estates are sometimes held by foolish forms, the breaking of a stick or the payment of a peppercorn:  I was willing to hold the huge estate of earth and heaven by any such feudal fantasy.  It could not well be wilder than the fact that I was allowed to hold it at all.  At this stage I give only one ethical instance to show my meaning.  I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself.  To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion’s) a vulgar anti-climax.  Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman.  To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.  It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking.  It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it.  A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once.  Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere