attempt to meet the ever greater sophistication of the criminal, with every year that passes. I've invented one or two myself. In general, though, one has to rely on the standard textbook modes of attack and defence. I'm sure it is the same in every other walk of life. The community by and large sets the pattern of one's behaviour.
It is otherwise in the inner world. Because it is harmony a man seeks, and because a marriage based on convention is a comparatively superficial affair, so the community is little help in achieving harmony at home. The keeping of rules of conduct, conventionally, in rhythm with one's partner is a limited pleasure. So a man has to turn to his partner as a person, and seek in her the harmony which keeping rules of conduct can never bring. Naturally there is a great deal of convention built into all our conduct, all our behaviour patterns; life would be too complicated if one had to think out each situation afresh, before deciding how to behave. But the point I wish to make is that for there to be the continuous sense of harmony, there must be moments, and fairly frequent moments (not just once a year) when in one's imagination one embraces the other as a whole, as a complete person, and that means “faults and all”. That is not so easy. It is easy to rejoice in a person's virtue, and trustworthiness; it is not so easy to accept their faults. Most men's reaction, when they see their wives are not perfect, is to make their wives' faults, or intolerances, their own. Life is simpler then. But that is the lover blinding himself to his sweetheart's faults, and Shakespeare expressed it thus:
“For I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness,
Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy;
And, to enlighten thee, gave eyes to blindness,
Or made them swear against the thing they see;
For I have sworn thee fair; more perjur'd I,
To swear against the truth so foul a lie!”