(no subject)

[timelets]

...there would seem to be some truth in a story told about divorce, which runs as follows. A Roman once divorced his wife, and when his friends admonished him, saying: "Is she not discreet? is she not beautiful? is she not fruitful?" he held out his shoe (the Romans call it "calceus"), saying: "Is this not handsome? is it not new? but no one of you can tell me where it pinches my foot?" For, as a matter of fact, it is great and notorious faults that separate many wives from their husbands; but the slight and frequent frictions arising from some unpleasantness or incongruity of characters, unnoticed as they may be by everybody else, also produce incurable alienations in those whose lives are linked together.

--- Plutarch, The Lives. Aemilius, 5. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Aemilius*.html