with one of them and sharing daily life with her, it would have driven me to madness and to earning her hatred. Love and marriage do not agree..."

And when his friend answered: "And how can you conceive of two people living together without the bond of love binding them?"

Shaw replied: "Marriage ought to be forbidden to lovers. Marriage is a partnership between two; but let love enter into it, and everything is lost..."

Shaw did not believe in love, because love played no prominent role in his life.

He said once: "What people call love is a thing that cannot possibly happen except by way of a jest between two strangers who have met by chance in a hotel or a forest."

He believed that imaginary love plays a more important role in life than real love plays, and that what a woman gives her beloved in reality is feebler and slighter than what she grants him in dreams.

He declared: "The ideal love is love by way of letters..." And he added: "My correspondence with Ellen Terry (the actress) is a success-ful love story. I could have met her had I wished, but I did not

want to complicate that connection. As for her — though she lifted from her neck the yoke of five husbands, she never once wearied of me..."

And Shaw had an 'ideal' program for mating: that a crowd of healthy men and women should gather, in the dark, and couple, and then each go off to his own house without having seen his companion's face!..

On sexual relations

Shaw was once asked whether he was austere and puritanical in his sexual life. He answered that sexual intercourse was a savage and ugly thing in his eyes,

and that he could not conceive how any self-respecting man or woman could face one another in the light of day after they had spent the night together!..

He also said: "I loved sexual relations for their extra-ordinary power to call forth a spiritual flood of emo-tion and exaltation. In those moments I would give my words free rein, and they would race on unchecked. For I felt that the woman had a right to know what I felt while in her arms, and I wanted her to share what

I felt. But except in one case, as I believe, I never felt that I gave a woman half of what she gave me..."

On children:

Shaw's opinion of children was that they are a neces-sity that cannot be avoided... And he said that children are the last who can understand their fathers, just as fathers are the last who can understand their children. It is well known that Shaw was granted no children.

On family life

Two things Shaw never repented of: his birthplace and his marriage... And if the choice of his birthplace was one in which he had no hand, the choice of his wife was of course by his own will.

As for his advice concerning marriage and family life, it is this:

"Women, marry — but beware of marrying the man who squats at home all day long... I leave the house for a hut every morning, as the clerk leaves his house for the office. Women like the men to leave the house, especially if they are men like me, content to sit and think. A few days ago I turned and found on the wall something I had never noticed before, and when I pointed to it, Charlotte (his wife) chided me and added that it had been hanging on the wall for thirty years!..."