: The Eighth Year: A Vital Problem of Married Life by Gibbs Philip - Domestic fiction; Married people Fiction

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THE EIGHTH YEAR

A Vital Problem Of Married Life

New York

The Devin-Adair Company 437 Fifth Avenue

Sir Francis Jeune . President of the Divorce Court.

PART I--THE ARGUMENT

It was Sir Francis Jeune, afterwards Lord St. Helier, and President of the Divorce Court, who first called attention to the strange significance of the Eighth Year of married life. "The Eighth Year," he said, "is the most dangerous year in the adventure of marriage."

Afterwards, in the recent Royal Commission on Divorce, this curious fact was again alluded to in the evidence, and it has been shown by statistics of domestic tragedy, by hundreds of sordid little dramas, that at this period in the partnership of husbands and wives there comes, in many cases, a great crisis, leading often to moral disaster.

It is in the Eighth Year, or thereabouts, that there is the tug-of-war between two temperaments, mated by the law, but not mated, perhaps, in ideals, in ambitions, or in qualities of character. The man and woman pull against each other, tugging at each other's heartstrings. The Eighth Year is the fatal year, when if there is no give-and-take, no working compromise, no new pledges of loyalty and comradeship, the foundations of the home are shattered, and the hopes with which it was first built lie in ruins like a house of cards knocked down by a gust of wind.

There is not one cause, there are many causes, all leading up from the first day of marriage, inevitably, with the unswerving, relentless fatality of Greek Tragedy to the Eighth Year. They are causes which lie deep in the social system of our modern home life; in the little order of things prevailing, at this time, in hundreds of thousands of small households and small flats, inhabited by the middle-classes. It is mainly a middle-class problem, because the rich and the poor are, for reasons which I will show later in this argument, exempt in a large measure from the fatality of the Eighth Year. But all the influences at work among the middle-classes, in this strange age of intellectual disturbance, and of blind gropings forward to new social and moral conditions, have a close hearing upon this seeming mystery. The economic position of this class, its social ambitions, its intellectual adventures, its general education, its code of morality, its religion or lack of religion, its little conventional cults, the pressure of outside influences, thrusting inwards to the hidden life in these little homes, bringing dangerous ideas through the front doors, or through the keyholes, and all the mental and moral vibrations that are "in the air" to-day, especially in the air breathed by the middle-classes, produce--the Eighth Year.

Let us start with the first year of marriage so that we may see how the problem works out from the beginning.

In the middle-classes love still presupposes marriage , but how the dickens is he to manage it? He is just starting his career as Something in the City, or as a solicitor, barrister, journalist, artist, doctor. His income is barely sufficient for himself, according to his way of life, which includes decent clothes, a club, a game of golf when he feels like it, a motor-cycle or a small car, a holiday abroad, theatres, a bachelor dinner now and again--the usual thing. He belongs to the younger generation, with wider interests, larger ideas, higher ambitions than those with which his father and mother started life.

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