PART IICAUSES OF FAILURE

PART IICAUSES OF FAILURE‘For Marriage is like Life in this, that it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.’—R. L. Stevenson.‘Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat.’—Man and Superman.‘A wise man should avoid married life, as though it were a burning pit of live coals.’—Dhammika Sutta.ITHE VARIOUS KINDS OF MARRIAGE‘Marriage is the great mistake that wipes out the smaller stupidities of Love.’—Schopenhauer.Inone of his essays Stevenson says: ‘I am so often filled with wonder that so many marriages are passable successes, and so few come to open failure, the more so as I fail to understand the principle on which people regulate their choice.’Out of the chaos which envelops this ‘principle’ four special motives seem to stand out, and we can therefore roughly divide the marriages that take place into five sections thus—1. The Marriage of Passion.2. The Marriage of Convenience.3. Marriage for a Purpose.4. Haphazard Marriage.5. The Marriage of Affection.The Marriage of Passion.—One of MrSomerset Maugham’s characters inThe Merry-Go-Roundsays: ‘I’m convinced that marriage is the most terrible thing in the world, unless passion makes it absolutely inevitable.’ Although a profound admirer of Mr Maugham’s work, here I find myself entirely at variance with him. Most of the mad, unreasonable matches are those which ‘passion makes inevitable.’ Theoretically this is one of the most promising types of marriage—in practice it proves the most fatally unhappy of all. ‘They’re madly in love with each other, it’s an ideal match’ is a comment one often hears expressed with much satisfaction, but it is a painful fact that these desperate loves lead very frequently to disaster and divorce. Most of the miserable married couples personally known to me were ‘madly in love’ with each other at the start.Is it to be wondered at when one considers the matter? Nature, who seldom makes a mistake where primitive mankind is concerned is by no means infallible when dealing with the artificial conditions of our Western civilisation. In the East where greater sex licence is allowed, it seems quite safe to trustNature and follow the instincts she implants. Not so in our hemisphere. The young man and maid who fall under passion’s thrall are temporarily blind and mad; their judgment is obscured, their reasoning powers non-existent, nothing in the world seems of the slightest importance except the overwhelming necessityto givethemselves—to possessthe beloved, the being who has fired their blood.If the Fates are cruel, these two are permitted to rush into matrimony. Nature has worked her will and pays no more heed. She is well-satisfied: the children born of these unions of utter madness are generally the finest and strongest, and what else does Nature care about? But for the young couple? . . . Gradually the roseate clouds lift, the intoxicating fumes are wafted away—the rapture subsides, and each awakes from the effects of the most potent drug in the universe to find a very ordinary young person at their side—and around them a chain which men name ‘Forever!’Unhappy indeed are these two if, when they stand facing each other over passion’s grave, there proves to be no link at allbetween them except the memory of the madness that has died. Fortunately this is by no means always the case, butwhen it isa very unhappy married life must inevitably follow. Schopenhauer gives as the reason for such matches proving unhappy the fact that their participants look after ‘the welfare of the future generation at the expense of the present,’ and quotes the Spanish proverb, ‘He who marries for love must live in grief.’ From the point of view of the individual’s interest, and not that of the future generation, it certainly seems a mistake to wed the object of intense desire unless there is also spiritual harmony, community of tastes and interests, and many other points of union in common. But under the influence of suppressed passion people lose their clearness of mental vision and are therefore more or less incapable of judging.Let there be passion in marriage by all means—so far I entirely agree with Mr Maugham—but let it be merely the outer covering of love—a garment of flame the embrace of which is ecstasy indeed, but which, when it has burnt itself away, still leaves love a solid form of joy and beauty, erect beneathits ashes. ‘Real friendship,.founded on harmony of sentiment, does not exist until the instinct of sex has been extinguished.2Marriages of Convenienceare of two kinds, the wholly sordid, when money, social position, or some personal aggrandisement has been the motive on one or both sides, without any basis of affection; and the partially-sordid, when these reasons are modified by some existing affection or liking. In this category come the people who marry principally in the interests of their business or profession, such as the barrister who weds the solicitor’s daughter, or the young doctor who marries into the old doctor’s family. In this connection one recalls the father who advised his sons not to marry for money, but to love where money was. No doubt the possession of a little money or ‘influence’ is an added attraction to a maiden’s charm in the eyes of the go-ahead young man of to-day; and considering how hard it appears to be to earn a living nowadays one cannot altogether blame them—distressing as it seems from the sentimentalpoint of view. I don’t believe, however, that there are so many wholly sordid marriages outside the confines of the set generally prefixed as ‘smart.’ People who are not members of this glittering circle are already sufficiently shy of matrimony nowadays, and are afraid of the enormous additional handicap such a match would carry. Of course these unions are almost inevitably miserable failures, and one wonders what else the victims could have expected.We now come to the third division,Marriage for a Purpose. These matches are distantly allied with the partially-sordid, but there is nothing sordid about them, as they are frequently undertaken from the highest motives. In this class are the widowers who wed for the sake of their children, the spinsters whose motive is their desire for motherhood, the men and women who marry to possess a home, or for the sake of companionship. All these reasons are justifiable enough, and people who embark on matrimony with a set purpose generally take it very seriously, and determine tomake a success of it. Such marriages often prove extremely happy, perhaps for the very reason that so little is asked. The spirit of contentment is an excellent influence in married life, since love is often killed by its own excessive demands, as I shall endeavour to show later.Haphazard Marriagesseem to me the best way to describe those unions into which men drift without any special reason, sometimes almost against their own wish. Nature does not care how the young people come together as long as they do come, and sometimes a man finds himself drifting into matrimony almost before he is aware. I write a ‘man’ advisedly as women neverdriftinto wifehood. In these cases it is generally their set and deliberate purpose that has steered the man into the conjugal harbour unknown to him. He has merely followed the line of least resistance and found to his surprise that it leads to the altar. Mr Bernard Shaw has given a very amusing, and, in spite of itself, convincing, picture of this manœuvring inMan and Superman, where he also expresses his convictionthat ‘men, to protect themselves . . . have set up a feeble, romantic conviction that the initiative in sex business must always come from the man . . . but the pretence is so shallow, so unreal that even in the theatre, that last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only on the inexperienced. In Shakespeare’s plays the woman always takes the initiative. In his problem plays and his popular plays alike the love interest is the interest of seeing the woman hunt the man down. . . . The pretence that women do not take the initiative is part of the farce. Why, the whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins, and pitfalls for the capture of men by women. It is assumed that the woman must wait motionless to be wooed. Nay, she often does wait motionless. That is how the spider waits for the fly. The spider spins her web. And if the fly, like my hero, shows a strength that promises to extricate him, how swiftly does she abandon her pretence of passiveness, and openly fling coil after coil about him until he is secured for ever!’The Marriage of Affection.—‘Do youknow any thoroughly happy couples?’ says one of the characters inDouble Harness.‘Very hard to say. Oh, ecstasies aren’t for this world, you know—not permanent ecstasies. You might as well have permanent hysterics. And, as you’re aware, there are no marriages in heaven. So perhaps there’s no heaven in marriages either.’These sentiments are of a nature to disgust and irritate the ignorant girl of twenty by their callous unreality in her eyes, and to delight the experienced woman of, say, thirty, by their profound truth in hers—so utterly do one’s ideas about life change in the course of ten years or so!Sixty years ago George Sand wrote: ‘You ask me whether you will behappythro’ love and marriage. You will not, I am fully convinced, be so in either the one or the other. Love, fidelity, maternity are nevertheless the most important, the most necessary things in the life of a woman.’To the same effect writes R. L. Stevenson when he says: ‘I suspect Love is rather too violent a passion to make in all cases a good domestic character.’ Of course no very young people will believe this, but it is ahorrid sordid truth that, as a rule, the happiest marriages are those in which the couple do not love too intensely. I am speaking of solid, workaday happiness, not of ecstasies and raptures. The excessive claims made by passionate love and the fevered state of mind it produces are often the cause of its shipwreck. ‘If I am horrid, darling,’ a girl once said to her lover, when trying to make up a quarrel she herself had brought about, ‘it’s only because I love you so intensely.’ ‘Then, for God’s sake, love me less, and treat me better,’ snapped the outraged lover, and we can but sympathise with him.I have purposely used the wordAffectionin this division, in place of one signifying a greater degree of feeling, and I unhesitatingly state that generally speaking, the most successful marriages are those which—‘when the first sweet sting of love be past, the sweet that almost venom is,’ develop into the temperate, unexacting, peaceful and harmonious unions which come under this heading. To the ardent youths and maidens—restless seekers after the elusive joy of life—who will have none of this prosaic andinglorious counsel, and who are prepared to stake their all on the belief that the first sweet sting of love is going to last for ever, I say: Get your roses-and-raptures over some other way; don’t look for romance in marriage or, unless your case prove the exception to the rule, you will inevitably make a terrible mistake! . . . Oh, don’t askmehow it is to be done, but remember what I say, and don’t marry until the quiet, sober, beautiful and restful affection you now scorn becomes in your eyes a haven of peace from the storm and stress of life, and the highest good it contains.Another reason why the Marriage of Affection is the most likely to prove a success is because mutual respect enters so largely into its composition, and how enormously important this is in the holy estate, none can realise until they marry. I shall have more to say later about the urgent necessity for respect in married life.IIWHY WE FALL OUT: DIVERS DISCORDS‘And yet when all has been said, the man who should hold back from marriage is in the same case with him who runs away from battle.’—R. L. Stevenson.Wehave discussed those types of marriage more or less doomed to failure from the outset, and now come to the reason why so many matches prove unhappy when apparently every circumstance has been favourable.It was Socrates, I think, who said: ‘Whether you marry or whether you remain unmarried, you will repent it.’ The people who assert that marriage is a failure seem to lose sight of the fact that the estate was not ordained for the purpose of happiness, but to meet the necessities of society, and so long as these necessities are fulfilled by marriage, then the institution must be pronounced successful, however unhappy married people may be.If the reasons ‘why we fell out, my wife and I,’ were to be considered exhaustively, the subject would overflow the bounds of this modest volume and run into several hundred giant tomes; indeed I believe an entire library could be filled with books on this matter alone. Ever since Adam and Eve had a few words over their dessert, husbands and wives have gone on quarrelling continuously and the humble philosopher who said that certain people quarrelled ‘bitter and reg’lar, like man and wife,’ was merely describing a condition that habit had made familiar to him.As with the rest of life, in matrimony it is the little things that count, and the frail barque of married happiness founders principally on the insignificant, half-perceived rocks—the little jealousies, little denials, little irritations, little tempers, little biting words, which by degrees wear so many little holes in the stern that at last an irreparable leak is sprung and the ship goes down in the next storm. The big obstacles make a worse crash when theydoget in the way, but they can be seen from afar and steered clear of.A miserable husband who had come to the parting of the ways (having started in the madly-in-love section), once confided in me that the bitter and terrible quarrels between him and his wife always began for some utterly trivial reason, generally because he did not admire her clothes! Could anything be more pitifully absurd? ‘Then why,’ I asked, ‘as you’re so anxious to keep the peace, do you volunteer any criticism at all?’ ‘Oh, I never do,’ was the answer. ‘She asks me my opinion of a new gown, say, and gets angry when it’s unfavourable. Then of course I get angry too, I’m no saint, and presently we come to curses and words that sting like blows. Then I clear out for a couple of days, and of course there’s the devil to pay when I go back, and it begins all over again. Why, this present row has lasted five weeks or so, and in the beginning it was simply because I said I didn’t like the ostrich feather in her hat!’Again: I once met at a race-meeting a school-friend, long lost sight of, whom I had last seen as a newly-wedded wife, loving and beloved. She was now very much changed, hard and haggard of face. I askedafter the man I remembered as a radiant bridegroom.‘Oh, he’s gone the way of all husbands,’ she said, with a sigh; ‘liver, my dear.’‘Do you mean he’s dead?’ I asked, shocked and pained.‘Oh, dear, no, he’s alive enough, but he’s developed liver and that’s killed our love,’ was the cynical reply.It had. Devotion and dyspepsia are hard to reconcile and my friend’s husband had developed a nasty knack of throwing his dinner in the fire whenever it displeased him, a habit hardly conducive to home happiness.Food, as a fact, is one of the chief sources of friction in married life. It sounds farcical, but I am perfectly serious. Food, the ordering and cooking of it and the subsequent paying for it, is one of the great tragedies of a wife’s existence. Time, the great healer, mercifully deadens the intensity of this anguish, and matrons of fifty or so can face the daily burden of food-ordering with something like indifference. But to a woman who has not yet reached the fatal landmark aptly described as ‘the same age as everybody else, namely, thirty-five,’ it is thegreatest cross, whilst many a bride has had her early married life totally ruined by the horrid and ever recurring necessity of finding food for her partner. Men make fun of women because their dinner, when alone, so often consists of an egg for tea, but women have such a constitutional hatred of food-ordering, inherited, no doubt, from a long line of suffering female ancestry, that the majority of them would gladly live on tea and bread-and-butter for the rest of their lives sooner than face the necessity of daily meditating on a menu. For this reason I believe vegetarian husbands are particularly desirable, since the whole principle of food-reform is simplicity. Those who go in for it acquire an entirely fresh set of ideas on the importance of food, and become quite pathetically easily pleased. I know a woman whose husband is a vegetarian and she declared that the food question, so disturbing a factor in most homes, had never caused her a single tear, or frown, or angry word, or added wrinkle. She assured me that her husband would cheerfully breakfast off a banana, lunch off a lettuce, dine on a date and sup on a salted almond. When thehouse was upset on the occasion of a large evening party and there were no conveniences for the ordinary family dinner, the creature actually ate cheese sandwiches in the bathroom, by way of a dinner, and was quite pleased to do so, moreover! I could scarcely credit it at first, but it was really true.Of the many paltry little causes for friction in married life incompatibility of temperature has doubtless been a very fruitful source of dissension. If one shivers when the window is opened and the other is a fresh-air faddist and can’t breathe with it shut, an endless vista of possibilities of unhappiness is opened out. It was, I believe, Napoleon’s second wife, Marie Louise, who always got rid of her husband when she wished to, by merely keeping her apartments cold. The great man was only comfortable in a very hot room with a blazing fire.That grievous deficiency, no sense of humour, is another of the tiny little rocks on which married happiness often splits. This is natural enough, since an absence of this priceless quality is about the worst deprivation a traveller on life’s journey can suffer from. Among men the conviction isrife that women invariably suffer thus, but I think we can afford to leave them this delusion, since it affords them so much satisfaction. At one time I had a journalist friend of a painfully stodgy and unusually depressing literary habit. This poor soul fancied his vein was humour, and from him I have often endured the reading aloud of the dreariest laboured pages of japes and jests, which to his thinking were sparkling with wit. My patient, long-suffering listening only brought bitter derision for my alleged lack of humorous perception, but my criticism inspired the young man to write a cynical article on ‘Women and Humour,’ of the kind that editors—being men—delight in, and for which he consequently got well paid.As a fact, the things that amuse men frequently fail to amuse women andvice versâbut it is surely illogical to deduce from this that women’s humorous sense is inferior to men’s—or non-existent. As, however, this apparently insignificant question is of such importance in life generally, whether it be in a palace, a convent, a villa or a workhouse—I think a wife would be well-advised toassume amusement if she feels it not, laugh with her lord even when she doesn’t see the point, and cultivate indifference when he fails to laugh with her.Writers on marriage seem to have paid very little attention to this important point. Stevenson is one of the exceptions: ‘That people should laugh over the same sort of jest,’ he says, ‘and have many an old joke between them which time cannot wither or custom stale is a better preparation for life, by your leave, than many other things higher and better-sounding in the world’s ears. You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with someone else.’In a beautiful poem, Stephen Phillips describes how a bereaved lover can think calmly of his dead, when he looked at her possessions, the things she had worn, even when he read her letters; and her saddest words had no power to pain him, but when he came to—‘A hurried, happy line!A little jest too slight for one so dead:This did I not endure—Then with a shuddering heart no more I read,’In truth, the little joke shared, the old allusion at which both are accustomed to laugh, is a more potent bond than many a deeper feeling. One can recall these trifles long after one has forgotten the poignant moments of passion, the breathless heartbeats, the wild embraces which at the time seemed to promise such deathless memories. All, all are forgotten, but the silly little joke has still the power to bring tears to our eyes if the one with whom we shared it is lost to us.A great many people are wretched who would have been perfectly happy with another partner. ‘In the inequalities of temperament lies the main cause of unhappiness in marriage. Want of harmony in tastes counts for much, but a misfit in temperament for more.’ So ludicrously mismated are some couples that one wonders how they could ever have dreamed of finding happiness together. This again is frequently the fault of our absurd conventions, which make it so difficult for single young men and women to really get to know each other. However, things have improved so much in this direction during thelast decade or two that we ought not to grumble, but, even now, if a man show a decided preference for a girl’s company his name is at once coupled with hers in a manner which can but alarm a youth devoid of matrimonial intentions. That relic of the dark ages, the intention-asking parent, is by no means extinct, and many a promising friendship that might have ended in a happy marriage is spoilt by the clumsy intervention of this barbaric relative.A young barrister friend of mine—we will call him Anthony—once tried, for reasons of professional policy, to make himself agreeable to a solicitor with a very large family of daughters. Being a shrewd man, he selected one of the girls still in the schoolroom to pay particular attention to, and thus escaped the necessity of showing special interest in her elder and marriageable sisters. His intimacy with the family prospered, and the father became a very useful patron. However, as time went on, he discovered to his dismay that his little friend, Amaryllis, had grown up and that he was regarded in the family as her special property. Speedily he transferred his attachment to Aphrodite, the youngestgirl then in the schoolroom, and by this means saved himself from an entanglement with Amaryllis, whilst at the same time preserving the valuable friendship of her father. In an incredibly short time, however, Aphrodite was nubile, and the family once more expectant of securing Anthony as a permanent member. Once again he executed the same manœuvre, choosing this time the little Andromeda, a plain child still in the nursery. The family, though disappointed, remained hopeful, and the years passed peacefully on, bringing a few sons-in-law in their train, and innumerable boxes of sweets to the unprepossessing Andromeda. When, however, Andromeda too grew up, the wily Anthony feared his fruitful friendship must inevitably come to an end, since the only remaining daughter had already reached the dangerous age of fifteen, and bore moreover the improper name of Anactoria!A long friendship and a short engagement is perhaps the best combination. A prolonged engagement is the most trying relationship between the sexes possible to conceive. For the woman it means the drawbacks of matrimony without its charm ofrestful finality, or any of its solid worldly advantages. On the man’s side it means the irksomeness of the marriage yoke without any of its satisfactions and comforts. On the man, indeed, a long engagement is especially hard, as at least the woman is spared the burden of ordering his food and coping with his servants. Many a sincere affection has been killed by the restraints and irritations of a long engagement. Many a genuine passion has waned during its dreary course, until but a feeble spark of the great flame is left to light the wedded life, and both man and woman carry the mark of that suppressed ardour which, under happier circumstances, might have come to a joyous fruition. Their children, too, sometimes lack vitality, and show the need of the fire that died before they were begotten.I don’t know who it was who first coined the phrase ‘the appalling intimacy of married life’; certainly it is an apt expression, and one wonders at what period in the world’s history men and women began to find that intimacy ‘appalling.’ It sounds a modern enough complaint, and somehow one feels sure it wasnever indulged in by our grandmothers, who looked upon their husbands as a kind of visible embodiment of the Lord’s Will, and respected them accordingly. They would never have dreamed of finding irksome what Mrs Lynn Linton called the ‘chair-à-chaircloseness of the English home.’Much has been written of the degradation of love by habit, and Alexandre Dumas expresses the whole question to perfection in one crystal sentence: ‘In marriage when love exists habit kills it; when love does not exist habit calls it into being.’ This is profoundly true, and for every passion habit has killed it must certainly have created more genuine affections.The Spartan plan of allowing husband and wife to meet only by stealth shows an acute understanding of human nature and has much to recommend it, if the object in view is to prolong the period of passion. But we are not now dealing with passion, but with the ordinary affection between people who have to live together under the trying conditions of modern marriage, and in these circumstances one must agree with Dumas as to the wonders worked by habit.Indeed, if people only realised it, habit is the cement which holds the edifice of matrimony together. With the passing of years, given the slightest basis of mutual harmony, one’s partner becomes indispensable—not by reason of her charms or the love we bear him, but simply because she or he is a part of our lives. That is why I think the policy of constant separation foolish. It is based presumably on the erroneous supposition that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Where the basis of mutual harmony doesnotexist, it may be true; and if a couple dislike each other and get on badly, a short separation may serve to relieve the tension, and to send them back each resolved to try and make things smoother in future. But where affection exists, it is a mistake. One learns to do without the other; that linking chain of little daily intimacies, oft-repeated jests, endearing customs, is temporarily snapped, and it is not easily put together again. My friend Miranda said to me not long ago: ‘If Lysander’s been away from me a day I’ve heaps to talk about when he returns—if we’ve been parted a month, I’ve nothing on earth to say.’I think it is dela Rochfoucauldwho says:‘Absence deepens great passions and lessens little ones just as the wind puts out the candle and heightens the fire.’ This is fine from the literary point of view, but is it true? My experience says No. Yetduringthe absence this aphorism seems true enough. Disillusion comes with reunion. Who does not remember that first departure of the Beloved—the innumerable letters, the endless meditation, the ceaseless yearning and the everlasting planning for the glorious return? What a meeting that is going to be! How one dwells in thought on that first goodly satisfaction of the desire of the eyes; goodlier still that joyous clasping of the hands; goodliest of all that glorious locking of the lips, that unending embrace in the ecstasy of which all the wretched hours of absence are to be forgotten—and, oh! laughter of the gods! how different it really proves! What a hideous disappointment the meeting is! How different the Beloved looks from our passionate dream; his hair wants cutting; we don’t like his boots; his tie is not of our choosing; his speech does not please us; his kiss has no thrill; his remarks bore; his presence irritates: in short,we have learnt todo without him, so nothing he does seems right. Poor Beloved! and did you think the same of us? Are you disappointed too? Did you say to yourself: ‘How fagged she looks! By Jove! she’s getting a double chin. I thought pink used to suit her. What’s she done to her hair? Her voice seems sharper. Why does she laugh like that? I don’t like her teeth. Good heavens, the woman’s hideous!’ In short,he has learnt to do without us. When husbands and wives learn this lesson, the good ship ‘Wedded Bliss’ is getting into perilous waters where danger of utter wreck looms large.But it is equally fatal to go to the other extreme, and I entirely agree with that authoress (who was she?) who said that no house could be expected to go on properly unless the male members of the family are out of it for at least six hours daily, Sundays excepted. The woman whose husband’s occupation, or lack of it, keeps him at home all day has my profound sympathy. Merely to have to think out and order a man’s lunch as well as his breakfast and dinner must be a bitter trial. For this reason among others women should never marry a man who doesnot work atsomething. If he has no bread-winning business to remove him from his wife’s sphere of action for several hours daily, then he must have a hobby, or a game mania, or engrossing duties which serve the same purpose. Otherwise the wife must be constituted on a plane of inhuman goodness and possess infinite love, tact, and patience if the two are to live happily together.The same principle applies to women, though it is not generally recognised. I am convinced that a great number of middle-class marriages prove unhappy merely because the woman has not enough to do. Possessed of sufficient servants, her household duties occupy a very small portion of her leisure, and if her children are at school (or perhaps she has none) she has nothing more engrossing to do than read novels and pay visits. The result is that one type of woman cultivates nerves and becomes a neurasthenic semi-invalid; another cultivates the opposite sex and fills her leisure hours with undesirable philandering; another develops temper or melancholy or jealous fancies; and so on—all of them spoilt as companions merely for want of sufficient occupation.IIITHE AGE TO MARRY‘To me the extraordinary thing is not that so many people remain unmarried, but that so many rush into marriage, as they might rush into a station to catch a train. And if you catch the wrong train, what then? All you have to comfort you is the fact that you have travelled.’—Robert Hichens.A greatmany unhappy unions might be prevented if people could find their right age for marrying. As it differs with the individual, it is impossible to lay down any exact rule. Some men are capable of making a good choice at twenty-two; others don’t know their own minds at double that age. Some girls are fit for wifehood and maternity in their teens; others never.In the interests of abstract morality early marriages are desirable, and in England everything the law can do is done to encourage them. In France the preservation of family authority is considered all-important, and the law apparently tries to check early unions byevery means in its power, regardless of the high percentage of illegitimate births which is the direct consequence.3Broadly speaking, no woman should wed until she understands something of life, has met a good many men, has acquired a certain knowledge of physiology and eugenics and a clear understanding of what marriage really means. No woman should marry until she has learnt the value of money, and how to manage a household—until she has had plenty of girlish fun and gaiety, and is thus ready for the more serious things of life. Not until then is she likely to be happy in the monotony of wedlock or capable of attuning her mind to the necessity of being faithful to one man only, in thought as well as in deed. Broadly speaking, also, no man is likely to marry happily until he has seen life and plenty of it, has hammered out for himself something of a philosophy and obtained considerable knowledge of women and a consequent understanding of how to make one happy.This is not so easily done as men suppose, and it takes time to learn. Few men under thirty are fit to have the care of a wife, and Heaven preserve a girl from a young husband who is still a cub! No doubt she will have glorious moments, for there is something intoxicating about the ardour of a very young heart, and that is why we find boy and girl marriages so charming—in theory. Sometimes in the case of an exceptional couple, well suited to each other, they really are charming, and then it is the most beautiful marriage conceivable—two young things, starting off hand in hand on life’s journey, brave-hearted, loving, full of high hopes. But as a rule the glory is limited to moments only; young girls are mostly shallow and frivolous; very young men are often madly selfish and reckless. They are so proud of being the sole possessor of an attractive woman that their conceit, always immense, swells into monstrous proportions and they grow wholly unbearable. If dark days should come to the young couple, the boy-husband has no philosophy to support him, no knowledge of women to enable him to understand his wife and live happily with her,and little self-control for his help; she has the same defects of youth, and the result is failure. Stevenson puts it perfectly thus: ‘You may safely go to school with hope, but before you marry you should have learned the mingled lesson of the world.’ On the other hand, Grant Allen says that ‘the best of men are, so to speak, born married,’ and that it is only the selfish, mean, and calculating man who waits till he can afford to marry. ‘That vile phrase scarcely veils hidden depths of depravity,’ he continues. ‘The right sort of man doesn’t argue with himself at all on these matters. He doesn’t say, with selfish coldness: “I can’t afford a wife”; or “If I marry now I shall ruin my prospects.” He feels and acts. He mates like the birds, because he can’t help himself.’I must say that these young men who do not think, but merely feel and act, scarcely seem of the highest type in my opinion, and if mating like the birds were to be generally accepted as a sign of a noble nature—well, nobility would be decidedly less rare than at present!IVWILD OATS FOR WIVES‘Nothing that is worth saying is proper.’—G. Bernard Shaw.‘I don’t believe in the existence of Puritan women. I don’t think there is a woman in the world who would not be a little flattered if one made love to her. It is that which makes woman so irresistibly adorable.’—Oscar Wilde.Ifthere be any readers whose susceptibilities are shocked by this headline, they are respectfully requested—nay, commanded—to read no further. If there be any whose susceptibilities waver without as yet experiencing any actual shock, they are affectionately asked—nay, implored—to re-read several times the above quotation from Mr Shaw’s immortalCandida, to thereupon pull themselves together and take the plunge. I can promise them it won’t be anything like as terrible as they half hope—in fact its essential propriety will probably disappoint them bitterly!Curiously enough, though women are more anxious to marry than men, and do everything in their power to achieve what men often strive to resist—after marriage it is generally the woman who is most discontented. Of late years a spirit of strange unrest has come over married women, and they frequently rebel against conditions which our grandmothers would never have dreamed of murmuring at. There are a variety of causes for this: one that marriage falls short of women’s expectations, as I said in the opening chapter, another that they have had nofemininewild oats. Please note the qualifying adjective, duly italicised, and do not attempt to misunderstand me. I am no advocate of the licence generally accorded to men being extended to women.‘Wild oats’ of this nature, otherwise an ante-hymeneal ‘fling,’ was certainly not a necessity of our grandmothers, but a certain (fairly numerous) type of modern women seem to make better wives when they have reaped this harvest. Take for example the cases of Yvonne and Yvette which are personally known to me. Yvette was engaged at eighteen and married at twenty-one. At theage of twenty-six she was the mother of four children. She had scarcely time to realise what youth meant and begin to enjoy it before her girlhood was stifled under the responsibilities of marriage and maternity. She had accepted her first offer, and he was practically the only man she knew anything of. Beyond him she had seen nothing of men, or of the world; certainly she had never flirted or had men friends or enjoyed any admiration but that of herfiancé.At twenty-six Yvette began to realise that she had been cheated out of a very precious part of life and an invaluable experience. Though a fairly happy wife and a devoted mother, she felt that she might have had those lost delights as well as the domestic joys, and the knowledge enraged her.A dangerous spirit of curiosity entered her heart, and a still more dangerous longing for adventure and excitement. She realised that there were other men in the world who admired her besides her Marcus, and that she was pretty and still quite a young woman. At thirty Yvette was a mistress of the art of intrigue—had engineered several dangerousaffaires, and might have come to serious griefhad not Marcus been a singularly wise, tender, and understanding husband.‘It isn’t that I don’t love him dearly,’ she confided in me when resolving to turn over a new leaf. ‘I wouldn’t exchange him for anyone in the world, and you know what the children are to me—but somehow I want something else as well—some excitement. I feel I’ve had nofunin my life, and I wanted to have a fling before it was too late. When I was engaged I scarcely ever even danced with anyone but Marcus, and for the first four years of my married life I had a baby every eighteen months—it was nothing but babies, nursing the old one and getting ready for the new one! Not that I didn’t love it, but the reaction was bound to come, and it did. If only I could have had the excitement and the gaiety and the glamour first, and then married when I was about twenty-five, I should have been perfectly satisfied then, like Yvonne!’Yvonne certainly managed her affairs better. Fate saved her from the misfortune of falling in love too soon. She always had a train of admirers, and was enabled to enjoy the power of her womanhood to the full; she travelled, made delightful friendships with both sexes,learnt to know the world and acquired a philosophy of life. When she married, at twenty-nine, she had seen enough of other men to know exactly the kind of husband she wanted, and had had enough excitement to make her appreciate the peace and calm of matrimony.The secrets of many wives lie heavily on my soul as I write, and more than one woman, with some real reason for remorse, has confided in me that it was only that fatal desire for excitement that primarily caused her undoing. I shall instruct my son to be sure to marry a woman who has got her wild oats safely over, or select a wife of the more old-fashioned type who does not require them. With the modern temperament they must almost inevitably come sooner or later, and to what extent the modern temperament will have evolved by the time the Boy of Boys is marriageable, the ironical gods alone know!Bachelors take note! A woman—new style—who has knocked about over half the world and sown a mild crop of the delectable cereal will prove a far better wife, a more cheery friend and faithful comrade than the girlof more or less the same typewhosefirst experience you are, and who will make enormous claims on your love and patience by reason of her utter ignorance of men. You will possibly even have to live up to an ideal founded on novel-reading, and that you will find very wearing, my friend! The experienced woman knows men so thoroughly, she will expect nothing more of you than you can give her, and will appreciate your virtues to the utmost and make the best of your vices. ‘But she has flirted so outrageously,’ you say? Well, so much the better, she is less likely to do it after marriage. ‘But, hang it all, she has been kissed by other men,’ you say? Well then, she has no need for further experiences of this kind and is not likely ever to give her lips again to others once she is yours. . . . How can you be sure? That is one of the innumerable risks of marriage. How canshebe sure thatyourlast crop is sown, still less reaped? . . . Oh, my dear man, you really make me very angry—do for heaven’s sake try and get away from conventional ideas of right and wrong! Judge thingsfor yourself, and as they would seem, say, at the edge of an active volcano! . . . All the things we fuss so much aboutwould doubtless quickly assume their real value if viewed from this perilous situation.And even in the sad cases where a woman has sown real wild oats in the man’s sense of the word, how different the little moral rules and regulations which we keep for these occasions would appear in the face of an immediate and violent death. I heard not long ago of a very sad story which bears this out. A man very narrowly escaped death from drowning, shortly after he had broken his engagement with a girl he genuinely loved, on her confessing to him that, many years before, she had once yielded to the importunities of a passionate lover. I do not know what were his emotions in the awful moment when the waters closed over him, and he was experiencing that horrible fight for breath which those who have known it describe as the most terrible sensation conceivable. Apparently his hairbreadth escape from death tore from his eyes the swathings of conventional opinion with which he had been blinded. Instead of regarding himself as a deeply wronged man he realised that he had behaved horribly to the unfortunate girl, who had thus been doubly outraged by his sex.He sought her at once and begged to be taken back again, but she happened to be a woman of some spirit, and she refused to trust herself to a man of such narrow views, and given to such harsh judgment.Of course this treatment increased his love a thousandfold. It obsessed him to a painful degree, and in the end his desperate entreaties prevailed on her deep affection for him and she relented. Their marriage was not very happy, as may be imagined; they both loved to madness and the ghost of that dead passion stood ever between them, an invisible, poisonous presence that killed their joy in each other. After a time a deep melancholy settled on the woman, and she allowed some trifling illness to take such a hold on her that it caused her death.When she was dying, I am told, she said to her faithful friend: ‘If ever you meet another woman who has made one little slip—a thing which at the time seemed so natural and inevitable as not to be sin at all—tell her neverneverto confess it to the man she is going to marry, least of all if she loves him. If that confession doesn’t part them altogether, it will always be betweenthem. One does it wishing to be straight, but it’s the most dreadful mistake a woman can make.’Her wish to be straight had cost this poor woman not only her whole life’s happiness, and her very life itself, but the happiness of the man she loved, in whose interests she had made the confession that wrought the harm. ‘How dearly I have paid! how dearly I have paid!’ she used to say over and over again in her last illness.This is an absolutely true story, and it seems to me a burning injustice that a woman should suffer so bitterly for what would be absolutely disregarded in a man. I have no doubt there are many similar cases, and emphatically I say that such confessions are ill-advised. The ordinary conventional-thinking man placed in these circumstances would either throw a woman over, or marry her against his convictions. The extraordinary masculine code, for some reason beyond my feminine powers of comprehension, will not admit that a spinster who has had a lover, or even made one ‘false step,’ is a fit person to wed, though no man would object to marrying a widow, andmany men take respondentdivorcéesto wife.Even in the case of a rarely generous-minded, tolerant and understanding man, who judged the offence at its true computation, such knowledge would only prove disturbing and a source of insecurity to conjugal happiness. No good purpose of any kind can be served, and the ease which confession is proverbially supposed to gain for the sinner would be bought at a very heavy price.‘But two wrongs don’t make a right, and surely it can’t be proper for a woman to deceive a man on such a vital point,’ the stern moralist may exclaim. Possibly not, according to the strictly ideal standard of ethics; but, viewed from the larger standpoints of life and of commonsense, this ‘deceit’ would appear to be advisable. And be assured, my unpleasant moralist (I’m sure you are an unpleasant person), that the sinner will not get off ‘scot free,’ as you seem to fear. Many and many a stab will be her portion, for memory is a potent poison, and every expression of love and trust from her husband will most likely carry its own special sting, whilst the round, innocent eyes ofadoring little children, to whom she is a being that can do no wrong, will be a meet punishment for an infinitely greater fault. Meanwhile the man isin all probabilityin every way a gainer by the woman’s silence, for doubtless he is doubly dear to her for the very fact that the first man treated her badly, and she may perhaps be a better wife, a stronger and sweeter woman, a more capable mother, by reason of the suffering she has undergone.Now let no maliciously obtuse person attribute to me the pernicious doctrine that a woman with a past is the best wife for a man. I merely say that a good woman who has surrendered herself to an ardent lover and been afterwards deserted by him must necessarily have gone through such intense suffering that her character is probably deepened thereby and her capacity for love and faithfulness increased. It is another truism that suffering is necessary to bring out the best qualities in women.Men too should keep the details of their wild oats severely to themselves. In married life there are bound to be secrets and the happiest couples are those who know how tokeep them, each to him or her self. A very good motto for the newly betrothed would be that of Tom Broadbent inJohn Bull’s Other Island—‘Let us have no tellings—perfect confidence, but no tellings: that’s the way to avoid rows!’VA PLEA FOR THE WISER TRAINING OF GIRLSIfgirls were more reasonably trained with regard to matters of sex, there would be far fewer miserable wives in the world, and fewer husbands would be driven to seek happiness outside their home circle. If, when girls reach years of discretion, they were systematically taught some rudimentary outline of the fundamental principles of existence, instead of being left in utter ignorance as at present, the extraordinarily false notions of sex which they now pick up would cease to obtain, and a great deal of harm would thus be avoided. As it is, maidens are now given tacitly to understand that the subject of sex is a repulsive one, wholly unfit for their consideration, and the functions of sex are loathsome, though necessary. I write tacitly with intention, for little if anything is ever said to a girl on this subject; indeed, it is extraordinary how the ideas are conveyed to her without words, but inculcated somehow theycertainly are, and it is difficult to understand how mothers manage to reconcile this teaching with their evident wish that their girls should marry. The ideal held up to girls nowadays is apparently the sexless sort of Diana one—not merely chastity, but sterility.Most girls are aware from a very early age of the social advantages and importance of marriage, and grow up with a keen desire to accomplish it in due course, although secretly dreading it, because of their absurd perverted ideas of its physical side. Why cannot girls—and boys too, for that matter—be taught the plain truth (in suitable language of course) that sex is the pivot on which the world turns, that the instincts and emotions of sex are common to humanity, and in themselves not base or degrading, nor is there any cause for shame in possessing them, although it is necessary that they should be strenuously controlled. Why cannot girls be taught thatall love, even the romantic love which occupies so large a portion of their dreams,springs from the instinct of sex?4This may be thought a dangerous lesson, but the present policy of silence on this subjectis far more dangerous, inducing as it does a tendency to brood over the forbidden theme.I remember when in my early teens a schoolfellow of about fifteen confided in me that ‘a man’—he was a harmless boy of about twenty—had kissed her hand when passing her a tennis racquet. She drew her hand indignantly away, and said: ‘How dare you insult me!’ then left the tennis court and refused to play any more. I do not think many girls are so silly as this, but the incident illustrates the general tone inculcated at that school. And it shows what an emphasis on sex matters the girl’s mind had received, when she saw an insult in a perfectly innocent and courteous act of admiring homage. What a harmful preparation for life such training must be! This is the kind of teaching that results in those wretched honeymoons which one occasionally hears of in secret, and which produces unwilling wives whose disdainful coldness is their husbands’ despair. This lack of feeling and lack of comprehension of the needs of stronger, warmer natures is one of the deepest and most incurable causes of married misery.Let us teach our girls to regard sex as anaturalandordinaryfact, and the infinite evils which spring from regarding it as extraordinary and repulsive will thus be avoided. Let us bring them up to think that loving wifehood, passionate motherhood are the proper expression of a woman’s nature and the best possible life for her.In a very interesting book calledWoman in Transition, recently published, this view of woman’s destiny is repeatedly scoffed at. The writer, Annette B. Meakin, is a fellow of the Anthropological Institute, and evidently widely read and travelled. I will give a few quotations: ‘In the happy future when higher womanly ideals have spread around us we shall all realise, no matter to which sex we belong, that to hold unqualified motherhood before every girl’s eyes as her highest ideal is to play the traitor to our race and to humanity.’ . . . ‘English Head Mistresses—though often unmarried themselves—still consider it their pious duty to tell their pupils that motherhood is woman’s highest destiny, and the pupils . . . make marriage their first aim, and other success in life has consequently to take a second place.’ . . . ‘Somevery good women in England are still telling our young girls that motherhood is, for every woman, the worthiest goal, without suspecting that the doctrine they preach is dangerously conducive to that legal prostitution euphemistically known as loveless marriage, if not to greater evils.’ . . . ‘How can any girl who has been taught that maternity is woman’s only destiny dare to run the risk of losing it?’In answer to these objections: of course no sane person would holdunqualifiedmotherhood up to girls as their noblest ideal. Nor does any thoughtful individual believe that maternity is woman’sonlydestiny. But as tohighest(i.e.most noble) destiny—if worthy motherhood (and by the word worthy I wish to imply all the fine qualities of body and mind that go to produce healthy, intelligent, and well-trained children) does not fulfil it, I should like to know what does? In answer to this question that naturally springs to the mind of every reader, Miss Meakin contents herself with the statement: ‘In Finland and Australia, as in America and Norway, the young girl is taught that woman’s highest destiny is within the reach of every woman;that her highest destiny and her highest ideals depend, not on some man who may or may not come her way, but on herself; and that the highest ideal of womanhood is to be a true woman.’ This is well enough, but it is far too vague to be held up as woman’s standard. We want a more definite ideal than this to aim at. What, for instance,isa ‘true woman’ specifically? I should have thought the most essential part of such a one’s outfit was her potentialities for wifehood and motherhood.Miss Meakin blames teachers for inculcating the importance of motherhood into their pupils’ minds with the result that ‘other success in life has to take a second place.’ What then does this writer consider ought to take the first place? Does she seriously think the success of women in business or politics, as municipal councillors, as writers, artists, thinkers, is of more importance than the success of women as mothers?Is it possible?. . . I recall a poem of W. E. Henley’s on the woman question, one line of which runs ‘God in the garden laughed outright.’ Surely there must often be uproarious laughter in heaven nowadays whenthe woman question is being discussed on earth!So much for abstract ideals, but when we come to facts I must admit the lady’s argument is sound. ‘In a country where there are a million and a half more women than men,’ she pertinently states, ‘it is worse than foolish to teach young girls that motherhood is their highest destiny. Such teaching, if persisted in, will lead to greater evils than we care to contemplate even at a distance.’ But what greater evil could there possibly be than the existence of 30,000 prostitutes in London alone, as is the case to-day? If every one of these unfortunate women had been made to believe firmly, as an article of faith, that worthy motherhood was her highest destiny, there might be a good many less noughts to this number.Miss Meakin continues: ‘Besides the sacred duties of motherhood, there are the equally sacred duties of fatherhood, yet man does not allow these latter to interfere with his mental growth.’ Nor is there any need that woman should do so; the idea that a woman, to be a good wife and mother, mustnecessarily stunt her mental growth and forego all culture has long since been discarded.To my mind the whole trouble arises from the practice of teaching one set of catchwords to girls and another to boys, as Stevenson says. Since women cannot be mothers by themselves, it is useless to teach girls that motherhood is their highest destiny when we do not also teach boys that fatherhood is theirs, but—quite the contrary—give them to understand that marriage is something to be avoided, in early manhood at least.If we were to instruct all young people ofbothsexes that worthy marriage and parenthood are the highest destiny for average mortals, and they acted on this precept, many of the problems of the day would be solved, the numbers of superfluous women would be greatly reduced, the social evil would perceptibly diminish, the physique of the race would improve, and the birth-rate would quickly rise. In short, there would be less ironical laughter in heaven, and a great deal more honest happiness and health on earth! I shall have more to say of parenthood as an ideal in Part IV.VI‘KEEPING ONLY TO HER’: THE CRUX OF MATRIMONY‘We make gods of men and they leave us; others make brutes of them and they fawn and are faithful!’—Oscar Wilde.‘It is part of the curse of nature that a man ceases after a time to worship the body of a woman, and when after that there is nothing his mind and soul can revere—who shall remain true, as it is called?’—Mary L. Pendered.‘Andkeep thee only to her as long as ye both shall live.’ How many men have solemnly undertaken this exacting vow sincerely meaning to abide by it? I have no data for answering this question, but I have sufficient belief in the essential good in human nature to believe that most people start their married life meaning to be faithful. This belief was not even shattered by the shock of hearing a very modern bride remark the other day: ‘Max says he can’t promise to be faithful but he’ll do his best.’ The amazingcomplacency of the young woman was a thing to marvel at, though hardly to admire.Schopenhauer asserts that ‘Conjugal fidelity is artificial with men, but natural to women.’ Judging by the Divorce Court returns, it would seem that this natural feminine trait has weakened somewhat, since this view was expressed some sixty years ago. According to the Society chroniclers—self-appointed—it certainly has in ‘London’s West End, littered with broken vows.’It is dangerous to generalise on such a topic, but since people resist temptation far less often than moralists suppose, it is perhaps safe to state that when men are faithful, it is principally from lack of opportunity, or disinclination to be otherwise. This may disgust those of my feminine readers who refuse to acknowledge, with Professor Lester Ward, that man is essentially a polygamous animal, but the more experienced in the sorrowful facts of life will own the truth of this statement.On the other hand, when women break their marriage vow, it is seldom for any merely frivolous or sordid reason (of course excepting the essentially wanton type, whomno man should be fool enough to marry), but nearly always either because they are under the spell of infatuation for the other man, or because they are utterly miserable in their marriage and seek to drug themselves to forgetfulness or indifference by means of the poison of some intrigue. Perhaps the Judge who is more merciful than men will count both these reasons as excuses and will pardon the sinners who have greatly loved or greatly sorrowed.A doctor who is interested in the study of social questions once showed me some interesting statistics on this subject. From seventy-six men selected at random from his list of acquaintances, fourteen were childless, and all but two of these were much happier than most men, and gave their wives no cause for jealousy. This high percentage of happy though childless marriages is rather curious—I cannot account for it. Of the remaining sixty-two, all had families: five were fond of their wives, but not faithful; two lived apart with other women; three others were unhappily married, quarrelling bitterly and constantly. Of two others, my friend was doubtful. One other disliked hiswife, but was too busy to bother about other women. The remaining forty-nine were comparatively happy and devoted: ‘Most of them are kept free from any great temptation by busy lives and regular hours,’ the doctor added, ‘and those who are especially appreciative or susceptible in regard to the fair sex have had enough love-making, and want no more outside their homes.’ I suspect this latter cause is applicable to a great many so-called ‘model’ husbands!This list, however, can scarcely be considered representative, as it contained only two actors, three soldiers, one sailor, and no stockbrokers—four classes in which inconstant husbands are particularly numerous. The conditions of an actor’s life obviously tend towards infidelity; the unhealthy excitement and alternating depression of a stockbroker’s existence may have the same effect. Members of the services are popularly supposed to be less faithful than the rest of husbands, but possibly if the business and professional men had the same amount of opportunities and temptation, a similar excess of leisure and equally long intervals of separation from their wives, they wouldprove as inconstant as the country’s defenders are supposed to be. My doctor’s list also contains no members of the ‘Smart Set,’ a class containing practically no faithful husbands, according to Father Vaughan!Although it is the little things that spoil conjugal happiness, it is the big things which separate husband and wife, and of these undoubtedly infidelity is the most frequent cause. It might truly be called the crux of marriage. Personally I think only three faults are bad enough to make it socially worth while for a woman to leave her husband: drunkenness with violence; misconduct with members of the household, temporary or permanent; and introducing a mistress under a wife’s roof. In the case of a woman with children, even these are not enough if she cannot take the children with her. For the last-named act alone a wife could obtain a divorce under the code of Justinian.Lapses from the marriage vow on the part of one’s spouse are best treated, like all other troubles, in a philosophical spirit. It is, however, ‘easy to talk!’—one often hears that sexual jealousy is the most frightfulof mental tortures: Men are more keenly affected by it than women, and the man whose wife has been unfaithful seems to suffer more acutely, even when he does not care for her, than the woman in the reverse circumstances. That is because his passions are stronger, a man will tell you, or because he looks up to the mother of his children as a being above the sins of the flesh. Probably the real reason is that man has generally had his own way since theménagein Eden, and he resents having his belongings taken from him. Woman, however, can bear this deprivation better, being more accustomed to share her lord from the time when her sex began to multiply in excess of his—or is it that women have no instinctive antagonism to polygamy?The world has become well accustomed to man’s polygamous instinct by now, and even its laws are framed accordingly. In novels, the discovery of a husband’s infidelity always causes a perfect cataclysm; the reader is treated to page after page of frenzied scenes; the wife almost loses her reason; her friends and relatives sit in gloomy council deciding ‘what is to be done’; thenews is shouted from the housetops; and everybody cuts the man dead.But in real life, women keep these tragedies to themselves, sometimes bearing them with a strange calmness and philosophy. Fortunately a man is seldom so lacking in worldly wisdom as to let his wife discover his misconduct, and, as a rule, a woman would rather die than reveal such a wound to the world. The burden of a husband’s infidelity is borne for years in silence with smiling face and head held high, by many a wife too proud to own herself incapable of keeping a man faithful. Only when years have accustomed her to the humiliation, and dulled the sharp edge of her grief, does she permit herself the relief of confidences.Few women can understand why a husband, though fond of and devoted to his wife, should nevertheless seek elsewhere that which she has ceased to possess for him. She whose knowledge of the springs of life is deep enough to enable her to understand this, knows also that hers is the better part, that she represents to her husband the centre and mainspring of his existence, whichremains steadfast long after his temporary amorous madnesses have burned away to ashes.Nevertheless, after ‘Alone’—‘Unfaithful’ is perhaps the saddest and most awful word in human speech. One can imagine it written innumerable times, in flaming letters, across the confines of Hell. . . .Unfaithful!

PART IICAUSES OF FAILURE‘For Marriage is like Life in this, that it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.’—R. L. Stevenson.‘Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat.’—Man and Superman.‘A wise man should avoid married life, as though it were a burning pit of live coals.’—Dhammika Sutta.

‘For Marriage is like Life in this, that it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.’—R. L. Stevenson.

‘Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat.’—Man and Superman.

‘A wise man should avoid married life, as though it were a burning pit of live coals.’—Dhammika Sutta.

‘Marriage is the great mistake that wipes out the smaller stupidities of Love.’—Schopenhauer.

Inone of his essays Stevenson says: ‘I am so often filled with wonder that so many marriages are passable successes, and so few come to open failure, the more so as I fail to understand the principle on which people regulate their choice.’

Out of the chaos which envelops this ‘principle’ four special motives seem to stand out, and we can therefore roughly divide the marriages that take place into five sections thus—

1. The Marriage of Passion.2. The Marriage of Convenience.3. Marriage for a Purpose.4. Haphazard Marriage.5. The Marriage of Affection.

1. The Marriage of Passion.

2. The Marriage of Convenience.

3. Marriage for a Purpose.

4. Haphazard Marriage.

5. The Marriage of Affection.

The Marriage of Passion.—One of MrSomerset Maugham’s characters inThe Merry-Go-Roundsays: ‘I’m convinced that marriage is the most terrible thing in the world, unless passion makes it absolutely inevitable.’ Although a profound admirer of Mr Maugham’s work, here I find myself entirely at variance with him. Most of the mad, unreasonable matches are those which ‘passion makes inevitable.’ Theoretically this is one of the most promising types of marriage—in practice it proves the most fatally unhappy of all. ‘They’re madly in love with each other, it’s an ideal match’ is a comment one often hears expressed with much satisfaction, but it is a painful fact that these desperate loves lead very frequently to disaster and divorce. Most of the miserable married couples personally known to me were ‘madly in love’ with each other at the start.

Is it to be wondered at when one considers the matter? Nature, who seldom makes a mistake where primitive mankind is concerned is by no means infallible when dealing with the artificial conditions of our Western civilisation. In the East where greater sex licence is allowed, it seems quite safe to trustNature and follow the instincts she implants. Not so in our hemisphere. The young man and maid who fall under passion’s thrall are temporarily blind and mad; their judgment is obscured, their reasoning powers non-existent, nothing in the world seems of the slightest importance except the overwhelming necessityto givethemselves—to possessthe beloved, the being who has fired their blood.

If the Fates are cruel, these two are permitted to rush into matrimony. Nature has worked her will and pays no more heed. She is well-satisfied: the children born of these unions of utter madness are generally the finest and strongest, and what else does Nature care about? But for the young couple? . . . Gradually the roseate clouds lift, the intoxicating fumes are wafted away—the rapture subsides, and each awakes from the effects of the most potent drug in the universe to find a very ordinary young person at their side—and around them a chain which men name ‘Forever!’

Unhappy indeed are these two if, when they stand facing each other over passion’s grave, there proves to be no link at allbetween them except the memory of the madness that has died. Fortunately this is by no means always the case, butwhen it isa very unhappy married life must inevitably follow. Schopenhauer gives as the reason for such matches proving unhappy the fact that their participants look after ‘the welfare of the future generation at the expense of the present,’ and quotes the Spanish proverb, ‘He who marries for love must live in grief.’ From the point of view of the individual’s interest, and not that of the future generation, it certainly seems a mistake to wed the object of intense desire unless there is also spiritual harmony, community of tastes and interests, and many other points of union in common. But under the influence of suppressed passion people lose their clearness of mental vision and are therefore more or less incapable of judging.

Let there be passion in marriage by all means—so far I entirely agree with Mr Maugham—but let it be merely the outer covering of love—a garment of flame the embrace of which is ecstasy indeed, but which, when it has burnt itself away, still leaves love a solid form of joy and beauty, erect beneathits ashes. ‘Real friendship,.founded on harmony of sentiment, does not exist until the instinct of sex has been extinguished.2

Marriages of Convenienceare of two kinds, the wholly sordid, when money, social position, or some personal aggrandisement has been the motive on one or both sides, without any basis of affection; and the partially-sordid, when these reasons are modified by some existing affection or liking. In this category come the people who marry principally in the interests of their business or profession, such as the barrister who weds the solicitor’s daughter, or the young doctor who marries into the old doctor’s family. In this connection one recalls the father who advised his sons not to marry for money, but to love where money was. No doubt the possession of a little money or ‘influence’ is an added attraction to a maiden’s charm in the eyes of the go-ahead young man of to-day; and considering how hard it appears to be to earn a living nowadays one cannot altogether blame them—distressing as it seems from the sentimentalpoint of view. I don’t believe, however, that there are so many wholly sordid marriages outside the confines of the set generally prefixed as ‘smart.’ People who are not members of this glittering circle are already sufficiently shy of matrimony nowadays, and are afraid of the enormous additional handicap such a match would carry. Of course these unions are almost inevitably miserable failures, and one wonders what else the victims could have expected.

We now come to the third division,Marriage for a Purpose. These matches are distantly allied with the partially-sordid, but there is nothing sordid about them, as they are frequently undertaken from the highest motives. In this class are the widowers who wed for the sake of their children, the spinsters whose motive is their desire for motherhood, the men and women who marry to possess a home, or for the sake of companionship. All these reasons are justifiable enough, and people who embark on matrimony with a set purpose generally take it very seriously, and determine tomake a success of it. Such marriages often prove extremely happy, perhaps for the very reason that so little is asked. The spirit of contentment is an excellent influence in married life, since love is often killed by its own excessive demands, as I shall endeavour to show later.

Haphazard Marriagesseem to me the best way to describe those unions into which men drift without any special reason, sometimes almost against their own wish. Nature does not care how the young people come together as long as they do come, and sometimes a man finds himself drifting into matrimony almost before he is aware. I write a ‘man’ advisedly as women neverdriftinto wifehood. In these cases it is generally their set and deliberate purpose that has steered the man into the conjugal harbour unknown to him. He has merely followed the line of least resistance and found to his surprise that it leads to the altar. Mr Bernard Shaw has given a very amusing, and, in spite of itself, convincing, picture of this manœuvring inMan and Superman, where he also expresses his convictionthat ‘men, to protect themselves . . . have set up a feeble, romantic conviction that the initiative in sex business must always come from the man . . . but the pretence is so shallow, so unreal that even in the theatre, that last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only on the inexperienced. In Shakespeare’s plays the woman always takes the initiative. In his problem plays and his popular plays alike the love interest is the interest of seeing the woman hunt the man down. . . . The pretence that women do not take the initiative is part of the farce. Why, the whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins, and pitfalls for the capture of men by women. It is assumed that the woman must wait motionless to be wooed. Nay, she often does wait motionless. That is how the spider waits for the fly. The spider spins her web. And if the fly, like my hero, shows a strength that promises to extricate him, how swiftly does she abandon her pretence of passiveness, and openly fling coil after coil about him until he is secured for ever!’

The Marriage of Affection.—‘Do youknow any thoroughly happy couples?’ says one of the characters inDouble Harness.

‘Very hard to say. Oh, ecstasies aren’t for this world, you know—not permanent ecstasies. You might as well have permanent hysterics. And, as you’re aware, there are no marriages in heaven. So perhaps there’s no heaven in marriages either.’

These sentiments are of a nature to disgust and irritate the ignorant girl of twenty by their callous unreality in her eyes, and to delight the experienced woman of, say, thirty, by their profound truth in hers—so utterly do one’s ideas about life change in the course of ten years or so!

Sixty years ago George Sand wrote: ‘You ask me whether you will behappythro’ love and marriage. You will not, I am fully convinced, be so in either the one or the other. Love, fidelity, maternity are nevertheless the most important, the most necessary things in the life of a woman.’

To the same effect writes R. L. Stevenson when he says: ‘I suspect Love is rather too violent a passion to make in all cases a good domestic character.’ Of course no very young people will believe this, but it is ahorrid sordid truth that, as a rule, the happiest marriages are those in which the couple do not love too intensely. I am speaking of solid, workaday happiness, not of ecstasies and raptures. The excessive claims made by passionate love and the fevered state of mind it produces are often the cause of its shipwreck. ‘If I am horrid, darling,’ a girl once said to her lover, when trying to make up a quarrel she herself had brought about, ‘it’s only because I love you so intensely.’ ‘Then, for God’s sake, love me less, and treat me better,’ snapped the outraged lover, and we can but sympathise with him.

I have purposely used the wordAffectionin this division, in place of one signifying a greater degree of feeling, and I unhesitatingly state that generally speaking, the most successful marriages are those which—‘when the first sweet sting of love be past, the sweet that almost venom is,’ develop into the temperate, unexacting, peaceful and harmonious unions which come under this heading. To the ardent youths and maidens—restless seekers after the elusive joy of life—who will have none of this prosaic andinglorious counsel, and who are prepared to stake their all on the belief that the first sweet sting of love is going to last for ever, I say: Get your roses-and-raptures over some other way; don’t look for romance in marriage or, unless your case prove the exception to the rule, you will inevitably make a terrible mistake! . . . Oh, don’t askmehow it is to be done, but remember what I say, and don’t marry until the quiet, sober, beautiful and restful affection you now scorn becomes in your eyes a haven of peace from the storm and stress of life, and the highest good it contains.

Another reason why the Marriage of Affection is the most likely to prove a success is because mutual respect enters so largely into its composition, and how enormously important this is in the holy estate, none can realise until they marry. I shall have more to say later about the urgent necessity for respect in married life.

‘And yet when all has been said, the man who should hold back from marriage is in the same case with him who runs away from battle.’—R. L. Stevenson.

Wehave discussed those types of marriage more or less doomed to failure from the outset, and now come to the reason why so many matches prove unhappy when apparently every circumstance has been favourable.

It was Socrates, I think, who said: ‘Whether you marry or whether you remain unmarried, you will repent it.’ The people who assert that marriage is a failure seem to lose sight of the fact that the estate was not ordained for the purpose of happiness, but to meet the necessities of society, and so long as these necessities are fulfilled by marriage, then the institution must be pronounced successful, however unhappy married people may be.

If the reasons ‘why we fell out, my wife and I,’ were to be considered exhaustively, the subject would overflow the bounds of this modest volume and run into several hundred giant tomes; indeed I believe an entire library could be filled with books on this matter alone. Ever since Adam and Eve had a few words over their dessert, husbands and wives have gone on quarrelling continuously and the humble philosopher who said that certain people quarrelled ‘bitter and reg’lar, like man and wife,’ was merely describing a condition that habit had made familiar to him.

As with the rest of life, in matrimony it is the little things that count, and the frail barque of married happiness founders principally on the insignificant, half-perceived rocks—the little jealousies, little denials, little irritations, little tempers, little biting words, which by degrees wear so many little holes in the stern that at last an irreparable leak is sprung and the ship goes down in the next storm. The big obstacles make a worse crash when theydoget in the way, but they can be seen from afar and steered clear of.

A miserable husband who had come to the parting of the ways (having started in the madly-in-love section), once confided in me that the bitter and terrible quarrels between him and his wife always began for some utterly trivial reason, generally because he did not admire her clothes! Could anything be more pitifully absurd? ‘Then why,’ I asked, ‘as you’re so anxious to keep the peace, do you volunteer any criticism at all?’ ‘Oh, I never do,’ was the answer. ‘She asks me my opinion of a new gown, say, and gets angry when it’s unfavourable. Then of course I get angry too, I’m no saint, and presently we come to curses and words that sting like blows. Then I clear out for a couple of days, and of course there’s the devil to pay when I go back, and it begins all over again. Why, this present row has lasted five weeks or so, and in the beginning it was simply because I said I didn’t like the ostrich feather in her hat!’

Again: I once met at a race-meeting a school-friend, long lost sight of, whom I had last seen as a newly-wedded wife, loving and beloved. She was now very much changed, hard and haggard of face. I askedafter the man I remembered as a radiant bridegroom.

‘Oh, he’s gone the way of all husbands,’ she said, with a sigh; ‘liver, my dear.’

‘Do you mean he’s dead?’ I asked, shocked and pained.

‘Oh, dear, no, he’s alive enough, but he’s developed liver and that’s killed our love,’ was the cynical reply.

It had. Devotion and dyspepsia are hard to reconcile and my friend’s husband had developed a nasty knack of throwing his dinner in the fire whenever it displeased him, a habit hardly conducive to home happiness.

Food, as a fact, is one of the chief sources of friction in married life. It sounds farcical, but I am perfectly serious. Food, the ordering and cooking of it and the subsequent paying for it, is one of the great tragedies of a wife’s existence. Time, the great healer, mercifully deadens the intensity of this anguish, and matrons of fifty or so can face the daily burden of food-ordering with something like indifference. But to a woman who has not yet reached the fatal landmark aptly described as ‘the same age as everybody else, namely, thirty-five,’ it is thegreatest cross, whilst many a bride has had her early married life totally ruined by the horrid and ever recurring necessity of finding food for her partner. Men make fun of women because their dinner, when alone, so often consists of an egg for tea, but women have such a constitutional hatred of food-ordering, inherited, no doubt, from a long line of suffering female ancestry, that the majority of them would gladly live on tea and bread-and-butter for the rest of their lives sooner than face the necessity of daily meditating on a menu. For this reason I believe vegetarian husbands are particularly desirable, since the whole principle of food-reform is simplicity. Those who go in for it acquire an entirely fresh set of ideas on the importance of food, and become quite pathetically easily pleased. I know a woman whose husband is a vegetarian and she declared that the food question, so disturbing a factor in most homes, had never caused her a single tear, or frown, or angry word, or added wrinkle. She assured me that her husband would cheerfully breakfast off a banana, lunch off a lettuce, dine on a date and sup on a salted almond. When thehouse was upset on the occasion of a large evening party and there were no conveniences for the ordinary family dinner, the creature actually ate cheese sandwiches in the bathroom, by way of a dinner, and was quite pleased to do so, moreover! I could scarcely credit it at first, but it was really true.

Of the many paltry little causes for friction in married life incompatibility of temperature has doubtless been a very fruitful source of dissension. If one shivers when the window is opened and the other is a fresh-air faddist and can’t breathe with it shut, an endless vista of possibilities of unhappiness is opened out. It was, I believe, Napoleon’s second wife, Marie Louise, who always got rid of her husband when she wished to, by merely keeping her apartments cold. The great man was only comfortable in a very hot room with a blazing fire.

That grievous deficiency, no sense of humour, is another of the tiny little rocks on which married happiness often splits. This is natural enough, since an absence of this priceless quality is about the worst deprivation a traveller on life’s journey can suffer from. Among men the conviction isrife that women invariably suffer thus, but I think we can afford to leave them this delusion, since it affords them so much satisfaction. At one time I had a journalist friend of a painfully stodgy and unusually depressing literary habit. This poor soul fancied his vein was humour, and from him I have often endured the reading aloud of the dreariest laboured pages of japes and jests, which to his thinking were sparkling with wit. My patient, long-suffering listening only brought bitter derision for my alleged lack of humorous perception, but my criticism inspired the young man to write a cynical article on ‘Women and Humour,’ of the kind that editors—being men—delight in, and for which he consequently got well paid.

As a fact, the things that amuse men frequently fail to amuse women andvice versâbut it is surely illogical to deduce from this that women’s humorous sense is inferior to men’s—or non-existent. As, however, this apparently insignificant question is of such importance in life generally, whether it be in a palace, a convent, a villa or a workhouse—I think a wife would be well-advised toassume amusement if she feels it not, laugh with her lord even when she doesn’t see the point, and cultivate indifference when he fails to laugh with her.

Writers on marriage seem to have paid very little attention to this important point. Stevenson is one of the exceptions: ‘That people should laugh over the same sort of jest,’ he says, ‘and have many an old joke between them which time cannot wither or custom stale is a better preparation for life, by your leave, than many other things higher and better-sounding in the world’s ears. You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with someone else.’

In a beautiful poem, Stephen Phillips describes how a bereaved lover can think calmly of his dead, when he looked at her possessions, the things she had worn, even when he read her letters; and her saddest words had no power to pain him, but when he came to—

‘A hurried, happy line!A little jest too slight for one so dead:This did I not endure—Then with a shuddering heart no more I read,’

‘A hurried, happy line!

A little jest too slight for one so dead:

This did I not endure—

Then with a shuddering heart no more I read,’

In truth, the little joke shared, the old allusion at which both are accustomed to laugh, is a more potent bond than many a deeper feeling. One can recall these trifles long after one has forgotten the poignant moments of passion, the breathless heartbeats, the wild embraces which at the time seemed to promise such deathless memories. All, all are forgotten, but the silly little joke has still the power to bring tears to our eyes if the one with whom we shared it is lost to us.

A great many people are wretched who would have been perfectly happy with another partner. ‘In the inequalities of temperament lies the main cause of unhappiness in marriage. Want of harmony in tastes counts for much, but a misfit in temperament for more.’ So ludicrously mismated are some couples that one wonders how they could ever have dreamed of finding happiness together. This again is frequently the fault of our absurd conventions, which make it so difficult for single young men and women to really get to know each other. However, things have improved so much in this direction during thelast decade or two that we ought not to grumble, but, even now, if a man show a decided preference for a girl’s company his name is at once coupled with hers in a manner which can but alarm a youth devoid of matrimonial intentions. That relic of the dark ages, the intention-asking parent, is by no means extinct, and many a promising friendship that might have ended in a happy marriage is spoilt by the clumsy intervention of this barbaric relative.

A young barrister friend of mine—we will call him Anthony—once tried, for reasons of professional policy, to make himself agreeable to a solicitor with a very large family of daughters. Being a shrewd man, he selected one of the girls still in the schoolroom to pay particular attention to, and thus escaped the necessity of showing special interest in her elder and marriageable sisters. His intimacy with the family prospered, and the father became a very useful patron. However, as time went on, he discovered to his dismay that his little friend, Amaryllis, had grown up and that he was regarded in the family as her special property. Speedily he transferred his attachment to Aphrodite, the youngestgirl then in the schoolroom, and by this means saved himself from an entanglement with Amaryllis, whilst at the same time preserving the valuable friendship of her father. In an incredibly short time, however, Aphrodite was nubile, and the family once more expectant of securing Anthony as a permanent member. Once again he executed the same manœuvre, choosing this time the little Andromeda, a plain child still in the nursery. The family, though disappointed, remained hopeful, and the years passed peacefully on, bringing a few sons-in-law in their train, and innumerable boxes of sweets to the unprepossessing Andromeda. When, however, Andromeda too grew up, the wily Anthony feared his fruitful friendship must inevitably come to an end, since the only remaining daughter had already reached the dangerous age of fifteen, and bore moreover the improper name of Anactoria!

A long friendship and a short engagement is perhaps the best combination. A prolonged engagement is the most trying relationship between the sexes possible to conceive. For the woman it means the drawbacks of matrimony without its charm ofrestful finality, or any of its solid worldly advantages. On the man’s side it means the irksomeness of the marriage yoke without any of its satisfactions and comforts. On the man, indeed, a long engagement is especially hard, as at least the woman is spared the burden of ordering his food and coping with his servants. Many a sincere affection has been killed by the restraints and irritations of a long engagement. Many a genuine passion has waned during its dreary course, until but a feeble spark of the great flame is left to light the wedded life, and both man and woman carry the mark of that suppressed ardour which, under happier circumstances, might have come to a joyous fruition. Their children, too, sometimes lack vitality, and show the need of the fire that died before they were begotten.

I don’t know who it was who first coined the phrase ‘the appalling intimacy of married life’; certainly it is an apt expression, and one wonders at what period in the world’s history men and women began to find that intimacy ‘appalling.’ It sounds a modern enough complaint, and somehow one feels sure it wasnever indulged in by our grandmothers, who looked upon their husbands as a kind of visible embodiment of the Lord’s Will, and respected them accordingly. They would never have dreamed of finding irksome what Mrs Lynn Linton called the ‘chair-à-chaircloseness of the English home.’

Much has been written of the degradation of love by habit, and Alexandre Dumas expresses the whole question to perfection in one crystal sentence: ‘In marriage when love exists habit kills it; when love does not exist habit calls it into being.’ This is profoundly true, and for every passion habit has killed it must certainly have created more genuine affections.

The Spartan plan of allowing husband and wife to meet only by stealth shows an acute understanding of human nature and has much to recommend it, if the object in view is to prolong the period of passion. But we are not now dealing with passion, but with the ordinary affection between people who have to live together under the trying conditions of modern marriage, and in these circumstances one must agree with Dumas as to the wonders worked by habit.

Indeed, if people only realised it, habit is the cement which holds the edifice of matrimony together. With the passing of years, given the slightest basis of mutual harmony, one’s partner becomes indispensable—not by reason of her charms or the love we bear him, but simply because she or he is a part of our lives. That is why I think the policy of constant separation foolish. It is based presumably on the erroneous supposition that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Where the basis of mutual harmony doesnotexist, it may be true; and if a couple dislike each other and get on badly, a short separation may serve to relieve the tension, and to send them back each resolved to try and make things smoother in future. But where affection exists, it is a mistake. One learns to do without the other; that linking chain of little daily intimacies, oft-repeated jests, endearing customs, is temporarily snapped, and it is not easily put together again. My friend Miranda said to me not long ago: ‘If Lysander’s been away from me a day I’ve heaps to talk about when he returns—if we’ve been parted a month, I’ve nothing on earth to say.’

I think it is dela Rochfoucauldwho says:‘Absence deepens great passions and lessens little ones just as the wind puts out the candle and heightens the fire.’ This is fine from the literary point of view, but is it true? My experience says No. Yetduringthe absence this aphorism seems true enough. Disillusion comes with reunion. Who does not remember that first departure of the Beloved—the innumerable letters, the endless meditation, the ceaseless yearning and the everlasting planning for the glorious return? What a meeting that is going to be! How one dwells in thought on that first goodly satisfaction of the desire of the eyes; goodlier still that joyous clasping of the hands; goodliest of all that glorious locking of the lips, that unending embrace in the ecstasy of which all the wretched hours of absence are to be forgotten—and, oh! laughter of the gods! how different it really proves! What a hideous disappointment the meeting is! How different the Beloved looks from our passionate dream; his hair wants cutting; we don’t like his boots; his tie is not of our choosing; his speech does not please us; his kiss has no thrill; his remarks bore; his presence irritates: in short,we have learnt todo without him, so nothing he does seems right. Poor Beloved! and did you think the same of us? Are you disappointed too? Did you say to yourself: ‘How fagged she looks! By Jove! she’s getting a double chin. I thought pink used to suit her. What’s she done to her hair? Her voice seems sharper. Why does she laugh like that? I don’t like her teeth. Good heavens, the woman’s hideous!’ In short,he has learnt to do without us. When husbands and wives learn this lesson, the good ship ‘Wedded Bliss’ is getting into perilous waters where danger of utter wreck looms large.

But it is equally fatal to go to the other extreme, and I entirely agree with that authoress (who was she?) who said that no house could be expected to go on properly unless the male members of the family are out of it for at least six hours daily, Sundays excepted. The woman whose husband’s occupation, or lack of it, keeps him at home all day has my profound sympathy. Merely to have to think out and order a man’s lunch as well as his breakfast and dinner must be a bitter trial. For this reason among others women should never marry a man who doesnot work atsomething. If he has no bread-winning business to remove him from his wife’s sphere of action for several hours daily, then he must have a hobby, or a game mania, or engrossing duties which serve the same purpose. Otherwise the wife must be constituted on a plane of inhuman goodness and possess infinite love, tact, and patience if the two are to live happily together.

The same principle applies to women, though it is not generally recognised. I am convinced that a great number of middle-class marriages prove unhappy merely because the woman has not enough to do. Possessed of sufficient servants, her household duties occupy a very small portion of her leisure, and if her children are at school (or perhaps she has none) she has nothing more engrossing to do than read novels and pay visits. The result is that one type of woman cultivates nerves and becomes a neurasthenic semi-invalid; another cultivates the opposite sex and fills her leisure hours with undesirable philandering; another develops temper or melancholy or jealous fancies; and so on—all of them spoilt as companions merely for want of sufficient occupation.

‘To me the extraordinary thing is not that so many people remain unmarried, but that so many rush into marriage, as they might rush into a station to catch a train. And if you catch the wrong train, what then? All you have to comfort you is the fact that you have travelled.’—Robert Hichens.

A greatmany unhappy unions might be prevented if people could find their right age for marrying. As it differs with the individual, it is impossible to lay down any exact rule. Some men are capable of making a good choice at twenty-two; others don’t know their own minds at double that age. Some girls are fit for wifehood and maternity in their teens; others never.

In the interests of abstract morality early marriages are desirable, and in England everything the law can do is done to encourage them. In France the preservation of family authority is considered all-important, and the law apparently tries to check early unions byevery means in its power, regardless of the high percentage of illegitimate births which is the direct consequence.3

Broadly speaking, no woman should wed until she understands something of life, has met a good many men, has acquired a certain knowledge of physiology and eugenics and a clear understanding of what marriage really means. No woman should marry until she has learnt the value of money, and how to manage a household—until she has had plenty of girlish fun and gaiety, and is thus ready for the more serious things of life. Not until then is she likely to be happy in the monotony of wedlock or capable of attuning her mind to the necessity of being faithful to one man only, in thought as well as in deed. Broadly speaking, also, no man is likely to marry happily until he has seen life and plenty of it, has hammered out for himself something of a philosophy and obtained considerable knowledge of women and a consequent understanding of how to make one happy.

This is not so easily done as men suppose, and it takes time to learn. Few men under thirty are fit to have the care of a wife, and Heaven preserve a girl from a young husband who is still a cub! No doubt she will have glorious moments, for there is something intoxicating about the ardour of a very young heart, and that is why we find boy and girl marriages so charming—in theory. Sometimes in the case of an exceptional couple, well suited to each other, they really are charming, and then it is the most beautiful marriage conceivable—two young things, starting off hand in hand on life’s journey, brave-hearted, loving, full of high hopes. But as a rule the glory is limited to moments only; young girls are mostly shallow and frivolous; very young men are often madly selfish and reckless. They are so proud of being the sole possessor of an attractive woman that their conceit, always immense, swells into monstrous proportions and they grow wholly unbearable. If dark days should come to the young couple, the boy-husband has no philosophy to support him, no knowledge of women to enable him to understand his wife and live happily with her,and little self-control for his help; she has the same defects of youth, and the result is failure. Stevenson puts it perfectly thus: ‘You may safely go to school with hope, but before you marry you should have learned the mingled lesson of the world.’ On the other hand, Grant Allen says that ‘the best of men are, so to speak, born married,’ and that it is only the selfish, mean, and calculating man who waits till he can afford to marry. ‘That vile phrase scarcely veils hidden depths of depravity,’ he continues. ‘The right sort of man doesn’t argue with himself at all on these matters. He doesn’t say, with selfish coldness: “I can’t afford a wife”; or “If I marry now I shall ruin my prospects.” He feels and acts. He mates like the birds, because he can’t help himself.’

I must say that these young men who do not think, but merely feel and act, scarcely seem of the highest type in my opinion, and if mating like the birds were to be generally accepted as a sign of a noble nature—well, nobility would be decidedly less rare than at present!

‘Nothing that is worth saying is proper.’—G. Bernard Shaw.

‘I don’t believe in the existence of Puritan women. I don’t think there is a woman in the world who would not be a little flattered if one made love to her. It is that which makes woman so irresistibly adorable.’—Oscar Wilde.

Ifthere be any readers whose susceptibilities are shocked by this headline, they are respectfully requested—nay, commanded—to read no further. If there be any whose susceptibilities waver without as yet experiencing any actual shock, they are affectionately asked—nay, implored—to re-read several times the above quotation from Mr Shaw’s immortalCandida, to thereupon pull themselves together and take the plunge. I can promise them it won’t be anything like as terrible as they half hope—in fact its essential propriety will probably disappoint them bitterly!

Curiously enough, though women are more anxious to marry than men, and do everything in their power to achieve what men often strive to resist—after marriage it is generally the woman who is most discontented. Of late years a spirit of strange unrest has come over married women, and they frequently rebel against conditions which our grandmothers would never have dreamed of murmuring at. There are a variety of causes for this: one that marriage falls short of women’s expectations, as I said in the opening chapter, another that they have had nofemininewild oats. Please note the qualifying adjective, duly italicised, and do not attempt to misunderstand me. I am no advocate of the licence generally accorded to men being extended to women.

‘Wild oats’ of this nature, otherwise an ante-hymeneal ‘fling,’ was certainly not a necessity of our grandmothers, but a certain (fairly numerous) type of modern women seem to make better wives when they have reaped this harvest. Take for example the cases of Yvonne and Yvette which are personally known to me. Yvette was engaged at eighteen and married at twenty-one. At theage of twenty-six she was the mother of four children. She had scarcely time to realise what youth meant and begin to enjoy it before her girlhood was stifled under the responsibilities of marriage and maternity. She had accepted her first offer, and he was practically the only man she knew anything of. Beyond him she had seen nothing of men, or of the world; certainly she had never flirted or had men friends or enjoyed any admiration but that of herfiancé.

At twenty-six Yvette began to realise that she had been cheated out of a very precious part of life and an invaluable experience. Though a fairly happy wife and a devoted mother, she felt that she might have had those lost delights as well as the domestic joys, and the knowledge enraged her.

A dangerous spirit of curiosity entered her heart, and a still more dangerous longing for adventure and excitement. She realised that there were other men in the world who admired her besides her Marcus, and that she was pretty and still quite a young woman. At thirty Yvette was a mistress of the art of intrigue—had engineered several dangerousaffaires, and might have come to serious griefhad not Marcus been a singularly wise, tender, and understanding husband.

‘It isn’t that I don’t love him dearly,’ she confided in me when resolving to turn over a new leaf. ‘I wouldn’t exchange him for anyone in the world, and you know what the children are to me—but somehow I want something else as well—some excitement. I feel I’ve had nofunin my life, and I wanted to have a fling before it was too late. When I was engaged I scarcely ever even danced with anyone but Marcus, and for the first four years of my married life I had a baby every eighteen months—it was nothing but babies, nursing the old one and getting ready for the new one! Not that I didn’t love it, but the reaction was bound to come, and it did. If only I could have had the excitement and the gaiety and the glamour first, and then married when I was about twenty-five, I should have been perfectly satisfied then, like Yvonne!’

Yvonne certainly managed her affairs better. Fate saved her from the misfortune of falling in love too soon. She always had a train of admirers, and was enabled to enjoy the power of her womanhood to the full; she travelled, made delightful friendships with both sexes,learnt to know the world and acquired a philosophy of life. When she married, at twenty-nine, she had seen enough of other men to know exactly the kind of husband she wanted, and had had enough excitement to make her appreciate the peace and calm of matrimony.

The secrets of many wives lie heavily on my soul as I write, and more than one woman, with some real reason for remorse, has confided in me that it was only that fatal desire for excitement that primarily caused her undoing. I shall instruct my son to be sure to marry a woman who has got her wild oats safely over, or select a wife of the more old-fashioned type who does not require them. With the modern temperament they must almost inevitably come sooner or later, and to what extent the modern temperament will have evolved by the time the Boy of Boys is marriageable, the ironical gods alone know!

Bachelors take note! A woman—new style—who has knocked about over half the world and sown a mild crop of the delectable cereal will prove a far better wife, a more cheery friend and faithful comrade than the girlof more or less the same typewhosefirst experience you are, and who will make enormous claims on your love and patience by reason of her utter ignorance of men. You will possibly even have to live up to an ideal founded on novel-reading, and that you will find very wearing, my friend! The experienced woman knows men so thoroughly, she will expect nothing more of you than you can give her, and will appreciate your virtues to the utmost and make the best of your vices. ‘But she has flirted so outrageously,’ you say? Well, so much the better, she is less likely to do it after marriage. ‘But, hang it all, she has been kissed by other men,’ you say? Well then, she has no need for further experiences of this kind and is not likely ever to give her lips again to others once she is yours. . . . How can you be sure? That is one of the innumerable risks of marriage. How canshebe sure thatyourlast crop is sown, still less reaped? . . . Oh, my dear man, you really make me very angry—do for heaven’s sake try and get away from conventional ideas of right and wrong! Judge thingsfor yourself, and as they would seem, say, at the edge of an active volcano! . . . All the things we fuss so much aboutwould doubtless quickly assume their real value if viewed from this perilous situation.

And even in the sad cases where a woman has sown real wild oats in the man’s sense of the word, how different the little moral rules and regulations which we keep for these occasions would appear in the face of an immediate and violent death. I heard not long ago of a very sad story which bears this out. A man very narrowly escaped death from drowning, shortly after he had broken his engagement with a girl he genuinely loved, on her confessing to him that, many years before, she had once yielded to the importunities of a passionate lover. I do not know what were his emotions in the awful moment when the waters closed over him, and he was experiencing that horrible fight for breath which those who have known it describe as the most terrible sensation conceivable. Apparently his hairbreadth escape from death tore from his eyes the swathings of conventional opinion with which he had been blinded. Instead of regarding himself as a deeply wronged man he realised that he had behaved horribly to the unfortunate girl, who had thus been doubly outraged by his sex.He sought her at once and begged to be taken back again, but she happened to be a woman of some spirit, and she refused to trust herself to a man of such narrow views, and given to such harsh judgment.

Of course this treatment increased his love a thousandfold. It obsessed him to a painful degree, and in the end his desperate entreaties prevailed on her deep affection for him and she relented. Their marriage was not very happy, as may be imagined; they both loved to madness and the ghost of that dead passion stood ever between them, an invisible, poisonous presence that killed their joy in each other. After a time a deep melancholy settled on the woman, and she allowed some trifling illness to take such a hold on her that it caused her death.

When she was dying, I am told, she said to her faithful friend: ‘If ever you meet another woman who has made one little slip—a thing which at the time seemed so natural and inevitable as not to be sin at all—tell her neverneverto confess it to the man she is going to marry, least of all if she loves him. If that confession doesn’t part them altogether, it will always be betweenthem. One does it wishing to be straight, but it’s the most dreadful mistake a woman can make.’

Her wish to be straight had cost this poor woman not only her whole life’s happiness, and her very life itself, but the happiness of the man she loved, in whose interests she had made the confession that wrought the harm. ‘How dearly I have paid! how dearly I have paid!’ she used to say over and over again in her last illness.

This is an absolutely true story, and it seems to me a burning injustice that a woman should suffer so bitterly for what would be absolutely disregarded in a man. I have no doubt there are many similar cases, and emphatically I say that such confessions are ill-advised. The ordinary conventional-thinking man placed in these circumstances would either throw a woman over, or marry her against his convictions. The extraordinary masculine code, for some reason beyond my feminine powers of comprehension, will not admit that a spinster who has had a lover, or even made one ‘false step,’ is a fit person to wed, though no man would object to marrying a widow, andmany men take respondentdivorcéesto wife.

Even in the case of a rarely generous-minded, tolerant and understanding man, who judged the offence at its true computation, such knowledge would only prove disturbing and a source of insecurity to conjugal happiness. No good purpose of any kind can be served, and the ease which confession is proverbially supposed to gain for the sinner would be bought at a very heavy price.

‘But two wrongs don’t make a right, and surely it can’t be proper for a woman to deceive a man on such a vital point,’ the stern moralist may exclaim. Possibly not, according to the strictly ideal standard of ethics; but, viewed from the larger standpoints of life and of commonsense, this ‘deceit’ would appear to be advisable. And be assured, my unpleasant moralist (I’m sure you are an unpleasant person), that the sinner will not get off ‘scot free,’ as you seem to fear. Many and many a stab will be her portion, for memory is a potent poison, and every expression of love and trust from her husband will most likely carry its own special sting, whilst the round, innocent eyes ofadoring little children, to whom she is a being that can do no wrong, will be a meet punishment for an infinitely greater fault. Meanwhile the man isin all probabilityin every way a gainer by the woman’s silence, for doubtless he is doubly dear to her for the very fact that the first man treated her badly, and she may perhaps be a better wife, a stronger and sweeter woman, a more capable mother, by reason of the suffering she has undergone.

Now let no maliciously obtuse person attribute to me the pernicious doctrine that a woman with a past is the best wife for a man. I merely say that a good woman who has surrendered herself to an ardent lover and been afterwards deserted by him must necessarily have gone through such intense suffering that her character is probably deepened thereby and her capacity for love and faithfulness increased. It is another truism that suffering is necessary to bring out the best qualities in women.

Men too should keep the details of their wild oats severely to themselves. In married life there are bound to be secrets and the happiest couples are those who know how tokeep them, each to him or her self. A very good motto for the newly betrothed would be that of Tom Broadbent inJohn Bull’s Other Island—‘Let us have no tellings—perfect confidence, but no tellings: that’s the way to avoid rows!’

Ifgirls were more reasonably trained with regard to matters of sex, there would be far fewer miserable wives in the world, and fewer husbands would be driven to seek happiness outside their home circle. If, when girls reach years of discretion, they were systematically taught some rudimentary outline of the fundamental principles of existence, instead of being left in utter ignorance as at present, the extraordinarily false notions of sex which they now pick up would cease to obtain, and a great deal of harm would thus be avoided. As it is, maidens are now given tacitly to understand that the subject of sex is a repulsive one, wholly unfit for their consideration, and the functions of sex are loathsome, though necessary. I write tacitly with intention, for little if anything is ever said to a girl on this subject; indeed, it is extraordinary how the ideas are conveyed to her without words, but inculcated somehow theycertainly are, and it is difficult to understand how mothers manage to reconcile this teaching with their evident wish that their girls should marry. The ideal held up to girls nowadays is apparently the sexless sort of Diana one—not merely chastity, but sterility.

Most girls are aware from a very early age of the social advantages and importance of marriage, and grow up with a keen desire to accomplish it in due course, although secretly dreading it, because of their absurd perverted ideas of its physical side. Why cannot girls—and boys too, for that matter—be taught the plain truth (in suitable language of course) that sex is the pivot on which the world turns, that the instincts and emotions of sex are common to humanity, and in themselves not base or degrading, nor is there any cause for shame in possessing them, although it is necessary that they should be strenuously controlled. Why cannot girls be taught thatall love, even the romantic love which occupies so large a portion of their dreams,springs from the instinct of sex?4This may be thought a dangerous lesson, but the present policy of silence on this subjectis far more dangerous, inducing as it does a tendency to brood over the forbidden theme.

I remember when in my early teens a schoolfellow of about fifteen confided in me that ‘a man’—he was a harmless boy of about twenty—had kissed her hand when passing her a tennis racquet. She drew her hand indignantly away, and said: ‘How dare you insult me!’ then left the tennis court and refused to play any more. I do not think many girls are so silly as this, but the incident illustrates the general tone inculcated at that school. And it shows what an emphasis on sex matters the girl’s mind had received, when she saw an insult in a perfectly innocent and courteous act of admiring homage. What a harmful preparation for life such training must be! This is the kind of teaching that results in those wretched honeymoons which one occasionally hears of in secret, and which produces unwilling wives whose disdainful coldness is their husbands’ despair. This lack of feeling and lack of comprehension of the needs of stronger, warmer natures is one of the deepest and most incurable causes of married misery.

Let us teach our girls to regard sex as anaturalandordinaryfact, and the infinite evils which spring from regarding it as extraordinary and repulsive will thus be avoided. Let us bring them up to think that loving wifehood, passionate motherhood are the proper expression of a woman’s nature and the best possible life for her.

In a very interesting book calledWoman in Transition, recently published, this view of woman’s destiny is repeatedly scoffed at. The writer, Annette B. Meakin, is a fellow of the Anthropological Institute, and evidently widely read and travelled. I will give a few quotations: ‘In the happy future when higher womanly ideals have spread around us we shall all realise, no matter to which sex we belong, that to hold unqualified motherhood before every girl’s eyes as her highest ideal is to play the traitor to our race and to humanity.’ . . . ‘English Head Mistresses—though often unmarried themselves—still consider it their pious duty to tell their pupils that motherhood is woman’s highest destiny, and the pupils . . . make marriage their first aim, and other success in life has consequently to take a second place.’ . . . ‘Somevery good women in England are still telling our young girls that motherhood is, for every woman, the worthiest goal, without suspecting that the doctrine they preach is dangerously conducive to that legal prostitution euphemistically known as loveless marriage, if not to greater evils.’ . . . ‘How can any girl who has been taught that maternity is woman’s only destiny dare to run the risk of losing it?’

In answer to these objections: of course no sane person would holdunqualifiedmotherhood up to girls as their noblest ideal. Nor does any thoughtful individual believe that maternity is woman’sonlydestiny. But as tohighest(i.e.most noble) destiny—if worthy motherhood (and by the word worthy I wish to imply all the fine qualities of body and mind that go to produce healthy, intelligent, and well-trained children) does not fulfil it, I should like to know what does? In answer to this question that naturally springs to the mind of every reader, Miss Meakin contents herself with the statement: ‘In Finland and Australia, as in America and Norway, the young girl is taught that woman’s highest destiny is within the reach of every woman;that her highest destiny and her highest ideals depend, not on some man who may or may not come her way, but on herself; and that the highest ideal of womanhood is to be a true woman.’ This is well enough, but it is far too vague to be held up as woman’s standard. We want a more definite ideal than this to aim at. What, for instance,isa ‘true woman’ specifically? I should have thought the most essential part of such a one’s outfit was her potentialities for wifehood and motherhood.

Miss Meakin blames teachers for inculcating the importance of motherhood into their pupils’ minds with the result that ‘other success in life has to take a second place.’ What then does this writer consider ought to take the first place? Does she seriously think the success of women in business or politics, as municipal councillors, as writers, artists, thinkers, is of more importance than the success of women as mothers?Is it possible?. . . I recall a poem of W. E. Henley’s on the woman question, one line of which runs ‘God in the garden laughed outright.’ Surely there must often be uproarious laughter in heaven nowadays whenthe woman question is being discussed on earth!

So much for abstract ideals, but when we come to facts I must admit the lady’s argument is sound. ‘In a country where there are a million and a half more women than men,’ she pertinently states, ‘it is worse than foolish to teach young girls that motherhood is their highest destiny. Such teaching, if persisted in, will lead to greater evils than we care to contemplate even at a distance.’ But what greater evil could there possibly be than the existence of 30,000 prostitutes in London alone, as is the case to-day? If every one of these unfortunate women had been made to believe firmly, as an article of faith, that worthy motherhood was her highest destiny, there might be a good many less noughts to this number.

Miss Meakin continues: ‘Besides the sacred duties of motherhood, there are the equally sacred duties of fatherhood, yet man does not allow these latter to interfere with his mental growth.’ Nor is there any need that woman should do so; the idea that a woman, to be a good wife and mother, mustnecessarily stunt her mental growth and forego all culture has long since been discarded.

To my mind the whole trouble arises from the practice of teaching one set of catchwords to girls and another to boys, as Stevenson says. Since women cannot be mothers by themselves, it is useless to teach girls that motherhood is their highest destiny when we do not also teach boys that fatherhood is theirs, but—quite the contrary—give them to understand that marriage is something to be avoided, in early manhood at least.

If we were to instruct all young people ofbothsexes that worthy marriage and parenthood are the highest destiny for average mortals, and they acted on this precept, many of the problems of the day would be solved, the numbers of superfluous women would be greatly reduced, the social evil would perceptibly diminish, the physique of the race would improve, and the birth-rate would quickly rise. In short, there would be less ironical laughter in heaven, and a great deal more honest happiness and health on earth! I shall have more to say of parenthood as an ideal in Part IV.

‘We make gods of men and they leave us; others make brutes of them and they fawn and are faithful!’—Oscar Wilde.

‘It is part of the curse of nature that a man ceases after a time to worship the body of a woman, and when after that there is nothing his mind and soul can revere—who shall remain true, as it is called?’—Mary L. Pendered.

‘Andkeep thee only to her as long as ye both shall live.’ How many men have solemnly undertaken this exacting vow sincerely meaning to abide by it? I have no data for answering this question, but I have sufficient belief in the essential good in human nature to believe that most people start their married life meaning to be faithful. This belief was not even shattered by the shock of hearing a very modern bride remark the other day: ‘Max says he can’t promise to be faithful but he’ll do his best.’ The amazingcomplacency of the young woman was a thing to marvel at, though hardly to admire.

Schopenhauer asserts that ‘Conjugal fidelity is artificial with men, but natural to women.’ Judging by the Divorce Court returns, it would seem that this natural feminine trait has weakened somewhat, since this view was expressed some sixty years ago. According to the Society chroniclers—self-appointed—it certainly has in ‘London’s West End, littered with broken vows.’

It is dangerous to generalise on such a topic, but since people resist temptation far less often than moralists suppose, it is perhaps safe to state that when men are faithful, it is principally from lack of opportunity, or disinclination to be otherwise. This may disgust those of my feminine readers who refuse to acknowledge, with Professor Lester Ward, that man is essentially a polygamous animal, but the more experienced in the sorrowful facts of life will own the truth of this statement.

On the other hand, when women break their marriage vow, it is seldom for any merely frivolous or sordid reason (of course excepting the essentially wanton type, whomno man should be fool enough to marry), but nearly always either because they are under the spell of infatuation for the other man, or because they are utterly miserable in their marriage and seek to drug themselves to forgetfulness or indifference by means of the poison of some intrigue. Perhaps the Judge who is more merciful than men will count both these reasons as excuses and will pardon the sinners who have greatly loved or greatly sorrowed.

A doctor who is interested in the study of social questions once showed me some interesting statistics on this subject. From seventy-six men selected at random from his list of acquaintances, fourteen were childless, and all but two of these were much happier than most men, and gave their wives no cause for jealousy. This high percentage of happy though childless marriages is rather curious—I cannot account for it. Of the remaining sixty-two, all had families: five were fond of their wives, but not faithful; two lived apart with other women; three others were unhappily married, quarrelling bitterly and constantly. Of two others, my friend was doubtful. One other disliked hiswife, but was too busy to bother about other women. The remaining forty-nine were comparatively happy and devoted: ‘Most of them are kept free from any great temptation by busy lives and regular hours,’ the doctor added, ‘and those who are especially appreciative or susceptible in regard to the fair sex have had enough love-making, and want no more outside their homes.’ I suspect this latter cause is applicable to a great many so-called ‘model’ husbands!

This list, however, can scarcely be considered representative, as it contained only two actors, three soldiers, one sailor, and no stockbrokers—four classes in which inconstant husbands are particularly numerous. The conditions of an actor’s life obviously tend towards infidelity; the unhealthy excitement and alternating depression of a stockbroker’s existence may have the same effect. Members of the services are popularly supposed to be less faithful than the rest of husbands, but possibly if the business and professional men had the same amount of opportunities and temptation, a similar excess of leisure and equally long intervals of separation from their wives, they wouldprove as inconstant as the country’s defenders are supposed to be. My doctor’s list also contains no members of the ‘Smart Set,’ a class containing practically no faithful husbands, according to Father Vaughan!

Although it is the little things that spoil conjugal happiness, it is the big things which separate husband and wife, and of these undoubtedly infidelity is the most frequent cause. It might truly be called the crux of marriage. Personally I think only three faults are bad enough to make it socially worth while for a woman to leave her husband: drunkenness with violence; misconduct with members of the household, temporary or permanent; and introducing a mistress under a wife’s roof. In the case of a woman with children, even these are not enough if she cannot take the children with her. For the last-named act alone a wife could obtain a divorce under the code of Justinian.

Lapses from the marriage vow on the part of one’s spouse are best treated, like all other troubles, in a philosophical spirit. It is, however, ‘easy to talk!’—one often hears that sexual jealousy is the most frightfulof mental tortures: Men are more keenly affected by it than women, and the man whose wife has been unfaithful seems to suffer more acutely, even when he does not care for her, than the woman in the reverse circumstances. That is because his passions are stronger, a man will tell you, or because he looks up to the mother of his children as a being above the sins of the flesh. Probably the real reason is that man has generally had his own way since theménagein Eden, and he resents having his belongings taken from him. Woman, however, can bear this deprivation better, being more accustomed to share her lord from the time when her sex began to multiply in excess of his—or is it that women have no instinctive antagonism to polygamy?

The world has become well accustomed to man’s polygamous instinct by now, and even its laws are framed accordingly. In novels, the discovery of a husband’s infidelity always causes a perfect cataclysm; the reader is treated to page after page of frenzied scenes; the wife almost loses her reason; her friends and relatives sit in gloomy council deciding ‘what is to be done’; thenews is shouted from the housetops; and everybody cuts the man dead.

But in real life, women keep these tragedies to themselves, sometimes bearing them with a strange calmness and philosophy. Fortunately a man is seldom so lacking in worldly wisdom as to let his wife discover his misconduct, and, as a rule, a woman would rather die than reveal such a wound to the world. The burden of a husband’s infidelity is borne for years in silence with smiling face and head held high, by many a wife too proud to own herself incapable of keeping a man faithful. Only when years have accustomed her to the humiliation, and dulled the sharp edge of her grief, does she permit herself the relief of confidences.

Few women can understand why a husband, though fond of and devoted to his wife, should nevertheless seek elsewhere that which she has ceased to possess for him. She whose knowledge of the springs of life is deep enough to enable her to understand this, knows also that hers is the better part, that she represents to her husband the centre and mainspring of his existence, whichremains steadfast long after his temporary amorous madnesses have burned away to ashes.

Nevertheless, after ‘Alone’—‘Unfaithful’ is perhaps the saddest and most awful word in human speech. One can imagine it written innumerable times, in flaming letters, across the confines of Hell. . . .Unfaithful!

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