When you are dining with an intimate friend, and an omelette au rhum is served, what do you do? Without any ceremony, you take a spoon, and, taking the burning liquid, you pour it over the dish gently and unceasingly. If you are careless, and fail to keep the pink and blue flame alive, it goes out at once, and you have to eat, instead of a delicacy, a dish fit only for people who like, or are used to have, their palates scraped by rough food. If you would be sure to be successful, you will ask your friend to help you watch the flame, and you will even ask him to lift the omelette gently so that the rhum may be poured all over it until the whole of the alcohol contained in the liquor is burned out.

This omelette au rhum is a fairly good symbol of matrimony.

In the earliest stage of married life the eggs have just been broken, beaten, and strewn with sugar, a light has been set, and everything is burning and perfectly beautiful. The young partakers of the matrimonial repast are intoxicated with their new life, their new emotions, their new sensations; they require no indulgence toward each other, no special cleverness or diplomacy to please each other; there are no concessions to make—neither of them can go or do wrong; the flame burns of itself.

I do not mean to say that the flame can be kept burning for ever and ever—alas! no, not any more than life can be made to eternally animate your body. The flame must go out one day, as some illness must one day end your life. But, just as hygiene teaches how to keep our good health prolonged by precautions of all sorts, just so does common-sense, aided by diplomacy and skill, help us to keep alive the flame of love between the man and the woman who have kindled it.

And let no woman accuse me of manly conceit if I say that, clever and attentive as the man must be, the woman has to be more clever and attentive still, and that simply because it is a fact—an uncontradicted fact (call it psychological if you like, or physiological if you prefer)—that the love or passion of a woman goes on naturally increasing in married life, whereas that of a man goes on just as gradually and steadily decreasing.

In marriage the flame of love has been known to keep long alive through the intelligence of the wife, and even without any effort in that direction on the part of the husband; but the contrary has never been known to be successful.

Woman is a divine delicacy who has to tempt the appetite of man; but the most exquisite delicacy may become insipid if served every day with the eternally same sauce. This is plain common-sense, and let me tell you this: that no married life (not one) has a shadow of chance to be happy for long unless the woman clearly understands and quickly realizes that, if moral duties are the same for men and women, Nature has made their temperaments absolutely different.