The community could never permit the practice, for it strikes at the very root of their whole social system.
The immense loss in happiness to these people in consequence of the omission by the too parsimonious Fates of that thread, which, with us, spins the whole of woman's web of life, and at least weaves the warp of man's, is but incidental to the present subject; the effect of the loss upon the individuality of the person himself is what concerns us now.
If there is one moment in a man's life when his interest for the world at large pales before the engrossing character of his own emotions, it is assuredly when that man first falls in love.

Then, if never before, the world within excludes the world without.

For of all our human passions none is so isolating as the tenderest.

To shut that one other being in, we must of necessity shut all the rest of mankind out; and we do so with a reckless trust in our own self-sufficiency which has about it a touch of the sublime.

The other millions are as though they were not, and we two are alone in the earth, which suddenly seems to have grown unprecedentedly beautiful.