LOVELESS MARRIAGES

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1717, 25 January 1905, Page 27

LOVELESS MARRIAGES

Is there anything in the wide world that sounds more desolate, dreary, or miserable than “a loveless marriage?" Marriage without love is like the world without sun. Love is the one thing that could make a dungeon like Paradise, and without it a palace could be like a prison. Yet ambition burns so strongly in some people that they will sacrifice the thought of love and marry for other gains that after marriage they realise are but so much dross.

When a beautiful woman, one of the most brilliant leaders of society, was asked what was the best she could wish for her daughter, she answered quickly, "To be the obscure loving wife of a man who loved her."

Feted, courted, as she herself was, she knew' more than others liow impossible it is ever to still a woman’s natural craving for love. Ambition may please and cheer, but it is only love that can satisfy at all times, that lias the power of smocking away difficulties, and which will compensate for all losses. A loveless marriage is the sorriest fate that can befall any man or woman, whether it be their own fault or not; their hourly misery is hardly less acuce. and they have for ever snut themselves out from the glorious sunshine that floods its golden radiance into the humblest peasant’s cottage.