The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: "Have you thought of what love is between a man and a woman when it means
marriage? That long, long life together, day after day, stripped of all
romance and distance, living face to face: seeing each other as a man sees
his own soul? Do you realize that the end of marriage is to make the man
and woman stronger than they were; and that if you cannot, when you are an
old man and woman and sit by the fire, say, 'Life has been a braver and a
freer thing for us, because we passed it hand in hand, than if we had
passed through it alone,' it has failed? Do you care for him enough to
live for him, not tomorrow, but when he is an old, faded man, and you an
old, faded woman? Can you forgive him his sins and his weaknesses, when
they hurt you most? If he were to lie a querulous invalid for twenty
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