you want it to do--push its way through the resistance of fine tungsten
filaments in your lamps and the iron wires in your heaters that get
white hot resisting it. When it's pushed its way through all of them and
done the work you want it to do, it's tired out and goes away by the
other wire. But if you cut off the insulation down in the basement,
where those two wires are close together, and make it possible for the
current to jump straight across without doing any work, it will take the
short circuit instead of the long one and you won't have any lights in
your house. Now do you see what I mean?

"Darby and Joan are civilized. That is to say, they're insulated. The
current's there, but it's long-circuited. The only expression it's got
is through the intelligence,--so it lights the house. Absence of common
knowledge and common interests only adds to the resistance and makes it
burn all the brighter. Naturally Darby and Joan fall victims to the very
dangerous illusion that they're intellectual companions. They think
they're having wonderful talks. All they are doing, is long-circuiting
their sex attraction. Well, marriage gives it a short circuit. Why
should the current light the lamps when it can strike straight across?
There you are!"

"And poor Joan," said Rose, after a palpable silence, but evenly enough,
"who has thought all along that she was attracting a man by her
intelligence and her understanding, and all that, wakes up to find that
she's been married for her long eyelashes, and her nice voice--and her
pretty ankles. That's a little hard on her, don't you think, if she's
been taking herself seriously?"

"Nine times in ten," he said, "she's fooling herself. She's taken her
own ankles much more seriously than she has her mind. She's capable of