As Arthur spends more time in middle-class circles, he becomes aware of something about them that he did not know previously: their preoccupation with marital bliss and domestic life. Neither the slum dwellers who struggle every day to keep body and soul together nor, he suspects, aristocrats, interested as they are in preserving their inheritance and fortunes, share this notion of marriage as a romantic ideal, almost to the point of holiness. Over and over he is told that the matrimonial home is an Englishman’s personal fortress against the entire world. But Arthur has far more pressing
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