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                MODERN MARRIAGE
               And How To Bear It

        BY
        MAUD
        CHURTON
        BRABY

                                  AUTHOR
                                      OF
                               “DOWNWARD”

       MODERN MARRIAGE AND HOW TO BEAR IT

  NEW SHILLING REPRINTS

  +LOVE INTRIGUES OF ROYAL COURTS.+ By THORNTON HALL.
  +FALLEN AMONG THIEVES.+ By STANLEY PORTAL HYATT.
  +THE UNCOUNTED COST.+ By MARY GAUNT.
  +SIX WOMEN.+ By VICTORIA CROSS.
  +DOWNWARD.+ By MAUD CHURTON BRABY.
  +SCARLET KISS.+ By GERTIE DE S. WENTWORTH-JAMES.
  +MISS FERRIBY’S CLIENTS.+ By FLORENCE WARDEN.
  +RED LOVE.+ By GERTIE DE S. WENTWORTH-JAMES.
  +MODERN MARRIAGE AND HOW TO BEAR IT.+ By MAUD CHURTON BRABY.
  +BIOGRAPHY FOR BEGINNERS.+ By G. K. CHESTERTON. With 48 Illustrations.
  +WHAT MEN LIKE IN WOMEN.+ By the Author of “How to be Happy
    though Married.”
  +THE SALVING OF A DERELICT.+ By MAURICE DRAKE.
  +THE NIGHT-SIDE OF LONDON.+ By ROBERT MACKRAY. With 65 Pictures
    by TOM BROWNE.
  +LADY JIM OF CURZON STREET.+ By FERGUS HUME.
  +2835 MAYFAIR.+ By FRANK RICHARDSON.
  +THE WILD WIDOW.+ By GERTIE DE S. WENTWORTH-JAMES.
  +LETTERS TO A DAUGHTER.+ By HUBERT BLAND.
  +THE GAME OF BRIDGE.+ By “CUT CAVENDISH.” With New Rules of Bridge
    and Auction Bridge.
  +THE NIGHT-SIDE OF PARIS.+ By E. B. D’AUVERGNE. 20 Plates.
  +THE WEANING.+ By JAMES BLYTH.
  +THE METHODS OF MR AMES.+ By the Author of “John Johns.”
  +THE HAPPY MORALIST.+ By HUBERT BLAND.
  +THE KING AND ISABEL.+ By the Author of “John Johns.”
  +THE SINEWS OF WAR.+ By EDEN PHILLPOTTS and ARNOLD BENNETT.
  +MODERN WOMAN AND HOW TO MANAGE HER.+ By WALTER GALLICHAN.

  _Press Notices Of_

  MODERN MARRIAGE
  _And How to Bear it_

  PRESS NOTICES

+W. T. Stead in the Review of Reviews.+--“Mrs Maud Churton Braby has
achieved a remarkable success. She has written an original book upon the
most threadbare of all subjects, in which she has been as witty as she
is wise . . . packed full of good sense, sound morality, and admirable
advice. It is a book naked and unashamed, written by a woman of the
world with the naïve simplicity of an innocent child, and arriving on
the whole at conclusions worthy of any mother in Israel; a book full of
profound wisdom irradiated by a pleasant wit and suffused with the glow
of a genuine human sympathy.”

+“Hubert” in the Sunday Chronicle.+--“On the whole I congratulate Mrs
Braby on her book . . . it is the only book on the subject of Modern
Marriage that has not made me feel rather ill . . . frank, without the
slightest indelicacy, and bold without the least impertinence . . . a
real contribution towards the solution of an intolerably difficult
problem.”

+Daily Telegraph.+--“Lively and frank . . . should prove instructive as
well as readable and provide people with plenty to think about. The
author has read widely, and thought deeply, and has a sufficiently broad
mind to give her conclusions real value . . . should be read by all who
think seriously on this most serious subject.”

+Standard.+--“A good deal of sound thinking has gone to the book’s
composition and it is also illumined by a very kind and tender spirit.”

+Bystander.+--“A clever and most entertaining volume . . . the reader
may be assured of much that is sage and sound, and much that is witty.”

+Black & White.+--“No one has gone so fully and vigorously into the
various problems connected with marriage as Mrs Braby in her extremely
readable book . . . one of the most vivid and original contributions to
the discussion of a great problem that have appeared for a long time.”

+Literary World.+--“Very brightly written, and even when most audacious
is full of good feeling and good sense . . . amusing and shrewd . . .
clever and stimulating.”

  _By The Same Author_

  DOWNWARD:

  An Attempt To Portray A
  “Slice Of Life.”

  _A NOVEL._

  By MAUD CHURTON BRABY
  (_Author of “MODERN MARRIAGE AND HOW TO BEAR IT.”_)

  6s.

This is a powerful study of modern life in London, and concerns the
hearts and passions of live men and women. Being the first novel by Mrs
Maud Churton Braby, author of that vivacious and daring book, “Modern
Marriage and How to Bear it.” As might be expected, some of the serious
problems of women are dealt with in its pages. The story concerns the
fortunes of brilliant and undisciplined Dolly who, on the death of her
mother, an actress, is compelled by the decree of a mysterious trustee
to go first to a convent-school and afterwards become a hospital nurse.
Her temptations and adventures at the Wimpole Street Nursing Home--
(in which environment other characters of much interest appear) --her
tragic love affair, and the depths to which it brings her, together with
her subsequent redemption, are related in a manner which makes a special
appeal to the heart.

  MODERN MARRIAGE
  AND HOW TO BEAR IT

  by

  MAUD CHURTON BRABY

  “Marriage is the origin and summit of all
  civilisation.”--GOETHE.

  _POPULAR EDITION_

  T. WERNER LAURIE
  Clifford’s Inn
  London

CONTENTS

  PART I
  SIGNS OF UNREST

Chap.                                                   Page

   I. The Mutual Dissatisfaction of the Sexes              3
  II. Why Men Don’t Marry                                 14
 III. Why Women Don’t Marry                               26
  IV. The Tragedy of the Undesired                        42

  PART II
  CAUSES OF FAILURE

   I. The Various Kinds of Marriage                       57
  II. Why We Fall Out: Divers Discords                    68
 III. The Age to Marry                                    85
  IV. Wild Oats for Wives                                 89
   V. A Plea for the Wiser Training of Girls             101
  VI. ‘Keeping Only to Her’--The Crux of Matrimony       109

  PART III
  SUGGESTED ALTERNATIVES

   I. Leasehold Marriage à la Meredith                   119
  II. Leasehold Marriage in Practice:
        A Dialogue in 1999                               129
 III. The Fiasco of Free Love                            141
  IV. Polygamy at the Polite Dinner-Table                146
   V. Is Legalised Polyandry the Solution?               159
  VI. A Word for ‘Duogamy’                               161
 VII. The Advantages of the Preliminary Canter           171

  PART IV
  CHILDREN--THE _CUL-DE-SAC_ OF ALL REFORMS

   I. To Beget or Not to Beget--the Question
        of the Day                                       177
  II. The Pros and Cons of the Limited Family            184
 III. Parenthood: The Highest Destiny                    193

  PART V
  HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH MARRIED

   I. A Few Suggestions for Reform                       203
  II. Some Practical Advice to Husbands and Wives        209

                       To

               C. STANLEY CHURTON

         The Best Father in the World

              With Deep Gratitude

       for a Lifetime of Loving-Kindness

  PART I

  SIGNS OF UNREST

  ‘The Subject of Marriage is kept too much in the dark. Air it!
  Air it!’--GEORGE MEREDITH.

  MODERN MARRIAGE

  THE MUTUAL DISSATISFACTION OF THE SEXES

  ‘The shadow of marriage waits, resolute and awful, at the
  cross-roads.’ --R. L. STEVENSON.

Ever since the time, nineteen years ago, when Mrs Mona Caird attacked
the institution of matrimony in the _Westminster Review_ and led the way
for the great discussion on ‘Is Marriage a Failure?’ in the _Daily
Telegraph_--marriage has been the hardy perennial of newspaper
correspondence, and an unfailing resource to worried sub-editors. When
seasons are slack and silly, the humblest member of the staff has but to
turn out a column on this subject, and whether it be a serious
dissertation on ‘The Perfections of Polygamy’ or a banal discussion on
‘Should husbands have tea at home?’ it will inevitably achieve the
desired result, and fill the spare columns of the papers with letters
for weeks to come. People are always interested in matrimony, whether
from the objective or subjective point of view, and that is my excuse
for perpetrating yet another book on this well-worn, but ever fertile
topic.

Marriage indeed seems to be in the air more than ever in this year of
grace; everywhere it is discussed, and very few people seem to have a
good word to say for it. The most superficial observer must have noticed
that there is being gradually built up in the community a growing dread
of the conjugal bond, especially among men; and a condition of
discontent and unrest among married people, particularly women. What is
the matter with this generation that wedlock has come to assume so
distasteful an aspect in their eyes? On every side one hears it vilified
and its very necessity called in question. From the pulpit, the clergy
endeavour to uphold the sanctity of the institution, and unceasingly
exhort their congregations to respect it and abide by its laws. But the
Divorce Court returns make ominous reading; every family solicitor will
tell you his personal experience goes to prove that happy unions are
considerably on the decrease, and some of the greatest thinkers of our
day join in a chorus of condemnation against latter-day marriage.

Tolstoy says: ‘The relations between the sexes are searching for a new
form, the old one is falling to pieces.’ Among the manuscript ‘remains’
of Ibsen, that profound student of human nature, the following
noteworthy passage occurs: ‘“Free-born men” is a phrase of rhetoric.
They do not exist, for marriage, the relation between man and wife, has
corrupted the race and impressed the mark of slavery upon all.’ Not long
ago, too, our greatest living novelist, George Meredith, created an
immense sensation by his suggestion that marriage should become a
temporary arrangement, with a minimum lease of, say, ten years.

That the time has not yet come for any such revolutionary change is
obvious, but if the signs and portents of the last decade or two do not
lie, we may safely assume that the time _will_ come, and that the
present legal conditions of wedlock will be altered in some way or
other.

Fifteen years ago there was a sudden wave of rebellion against these
conditions, and a renewed interest in the sex question showed itself in
an outbreak of problem novels--a term which later came to be used as one
of reproach. Perhaps the most important of these was Grant Allen’s _The
Woman Who Did_. I can recall as a schoolgirl the excitement it aroused
and my acute disappointment when it was forcibly commandeered from me by
an irate governess who apparently took no interest in these enthralling
subjects. A host of imitators followed _The Woman Who Did_; some of them
entirely illiterate, all of them offering some infallible key to the
difficult maze of marriage.

Worse still was the reaction that inevitably followed, when realism was
tabooed in fiction, and sickly romance possessed the field. _The Yellow
Book_ and similar strange exotics of the first period withered and died,
and the cult of literature (!) for the British Home was shortly
afterwards in full blast. There followed an avalanche of insufferably
dull and puerile magazines, in which the word _Sex_ was strictly taboo,
and the ideal aimed at was apparently the extreme opposite to real life.
It was odd how suddenly the sex note--(as I will call it for want of a
better word)--disappeared from the press. Psychology was pronounced
‘off,’ and plots were the order of the day. Many names well-known at
that time and associated with a _flair_ for delicate delineation of
character, disappeared from the magazine contents bill and the
publisher’s list, whilst facile writers who could turn out mild
detective yarns or tales of adventure and gore were in clover.

Signs are not wanting that the pendulum of public interest has now swung
back again, and another wave of realism in fiction and inquiry into the
re-adjustment of the conjugal bond is imminent. But the pendulum will
have to swing back and forth a good many times however, before the
relations between the sexes succeed in finding that new form of which
Tolstoy speaks. What the revival I have foretold will accomplish remains
to be seen. What did the last agitation achieve? Practically nothing;
a few women may have been impelled to follow in the footsteps of Grant
Allen’s Herminia to their undying sorrow, and possibly a good many
precocious young girls, who read the literature of that day, may have
given their parents some anxiety by their revolutionary ideas on the
value of the holy estate. But when that trio so irresistible to the
feminine heart came along--the Ring, the Trousseau, and the House of My
Own, to say nothing of the solid, twelve-stone, prospective
husband--which among these advanced damsels remembered the sermon on the
hill-top?

Yet in the fourteen years that have elapsed since the publication of
_The Woman Who Did_, there have certainly been some changes. For one
thing, it is still harder apparently to earn a decent living. Times
are bad and money scarce; men are even more reluctant than before to
‘domesticate the recording angel’ by marrying, and a type of woman has
sprung up amongst us who is shy of matrimony and honestly reluctant to
risk its many perils for the sake of its problematical joys. Most
noticeable of all is the growing dissatisfaction of the sexes with each
other. Men do not shun marriage only because of unfavourable financial
conditions, or because the restrictions of wedlock are any more irksome
to them than formerly, but because they cannot find a wife sufficiently
near their ideal. Woman has progressed to such an extent within the
last generation or two: her outlook has so broadened, her intellect
so developed that she has strayed very far from man’s ideal and,
consequently, man hesitates to marry her. There is something comic about
the situation, and at Olympian dinner-tables I feel sure the gods would
laugh at this twentieth-century conjugal deadlock.

Another reason why men fall in love so much less than they used to do is
largely due to the decay of the imaginative faculty. As for women,
although they are in the main as anxious to marry as ever, although it
is universally acknowledged that the modern young woman does cultivate
the modern young man unduly, their reasons for doing so are less and
less concerned with the time-honoured motives of love. Marriage brings
independence and a certain social importance; for these reasons women
desire it. H. B. Marriot Watson has put the case neatly thus: ‘Women
desire to marry _a_ man; men to marry _the_ woman.’ Nevertheless women
are even now more prone to fall in love than are men, because they have
better preserved this imaginative faculty, which is possibly also the
cause of the disillusionment and discontent of wives after marriage.

The upshot of it all is that men and women appear to have become
antagonistic to each other. However much they love the individual of
their fancy, a kind of veiled distrust seems to obtain between the sexes
collectively, but more especially on the part of men--perhaps because
man is more necessary to woman than woman is to man. This hostility
towards woman is particularly noticeable in the pages of the press.
Scarcely a week passes but some journalist of the nobler sex pours out
his scorn for the inferior one of his mother in columns of masterly
abuse on one score or another. Each article is followed by a passionate
correspondence in which ‘Disgusted Dad,’ ‘Hopeless Hubby,’ ‘Browbeaten
Brother,’ and the inevitable ‘Cynicus’ express high approval of the
writer, whilst ‘Happy Mother of Seven Girls’ and ‘Lover of the Sex’
write to demand his instant execution and public disgrace.

The range of men’s fault-finding is endless; one will assert that women
are mere domestic machines, unfit companions for any intelligent man,
and with no soul above conversation about their servants and children;
another that they are mere blue-stockings striving after an unattainable
intellectuality; a third that they are mere frivolous dolls without
brain or heart, engrossed in the pursuit of pleasure, a fourth that they
are sexless, slangy, misclad masculine monsters.

Judged by the assertions of newspaper correspondents, women are at one
and the same time preposterously masculine, contemptibly feminine,
ridiculously intellectual, repulsively athletic, and revoltingly
frivolous. In appearance they are either lank, gaunt, flat-footed
lamp-posts, or else over-dressed, unnaturally-shaped, painted dolls.
Their extravagance exhausts expletive! When they belong to the class of
society generally denoted with a capital S, they invariably smoke,
drink, gamble and swear. They neglect their homes and their children.
They have little principle and less sense, no morals, no heart and
absolutely _no_ sense of humour!

‘But,’ the observant reader may possibly exclaim, ‘there is nothing new
about this. Woman has ever been man’s favourite grumble-vent, from the
day when the first man got out of his first scrape by blaming the only
available woman!’ True enough, age cannot stale the infinite variety of
women’s misdemeanours, as viewed by men; tradition has hallowed the
subject, custom carries it on; and probably when the last trump shall
sound, the last living man will be found grumbling loudly at the
abominable selfishness of woman for leaving him alone, and the last dead
man to rise will awake cursing because his wife did not call him sooner!

But formerly man’s fault-finding was more of the nature of genial chaff,
as when we affectionately laugh at those we love. There was nearly
always a certain good humour about his diatribes, which now is lacking.
In its stead can be noted a bitterness, a distinct animus. Men
apparently take with an ill-grace women’s rebellion against the old
man-made conditions, and they retaliate by falling in love less
frequently, and showing still more reluctance to enter the arena of
matrimony.

Nevertheless, they get there all the same, albeit in a different spirit.
Timorous and trembling, our faint-hearted modern lovers gird on their
new frock-coats and step shrinkingly into the arena where awaits
them--radiant and triumphant--the determined being whose will has
brought them thither. No, not _her_ will, but the mysterious will of
Nature which remains steadfast and of unswerving purpose, indifferent
to our sex-warfare and the progress of our petty loves and hates. The
institution of marriage battered, abused, scarred with countless
thousands of attacks, stained with the sins of centuries still continues
to flourish, for, as Schopenhauer says; ‘_It is the future generation in
its entire individual determination which forces itself into existence
through the medium of all this strife and trouble._’

The _Will-to-Live_ will always have the last word!

  II

  WHY MEN DON’T MARRY

  ‘If you wish the pick of mankind, take a good bachelor and a good
  wife.’

  ‘There is probably no other act in a man’s life so hot-headed and
  foolish as this of marriage.’ --R. L. STEVENSON.

  ‘Whatever may be said against marriage, it is certainly an
  experience.’ --OSCAR WILDE.

‘All the men are getting married and none of the girls,’ a volatile lady
is once reported to have said, and one understands what she meant to
convey. In a newspaper correspondence on marriage I once noted the
following significant passage: ‘_But in these days it is different from
what it was when I was a girl. Then every boy had his sweetheart and
every girl her chap. Now it seems to me the boys don’t want sweethearts
and the girls can’t get chaps. For one youth who means honestly to marry
a girl, you will find twenty whose game is mere flirtation, regardless
of how the girl may be injured. The times are ungallant and they want
mending._’

This letter is signed ‘A Workman’s Wife,’ but it bears ample evidence of
having been written by a member of the staff, who seemed to consider
sufficient _vraisemblance_ had been given to the signature by the
inclusion of an occasional vulgarism, such as ‘chap.’ But in spite of
being penned to order, the statements expressed appear to be only too
true. The times are ungallant indeed and growing more so every year.

Not long ago I was at a cheery social gathering where the non-marrying
tendency of modern men was being discussed. Someone put all the men into
a good humour with the reminder that ‘by persistently remaining single,
a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation,’ and as there
were fifteen bachelors present, the conversation naturally became
personal.

One whom I will call Vivian, gallantly remarked that all the nice women
were married, so he perforce remained single. I happen to know that he
is deeply in love with a married woman. Another, Lucian, a very handsome
and popular man of thirty, said he fully meant to marry some day, but
wanted a few more years’ freedom first. Dorian gravely asserted that he
was waiting for my daughter (aged eighteen months), but being in his
confidence, I know that his case is similar to Vivian’s. Hadrian’s
health would make his marriage a crime; we are all aware of that
fortunately, so no one asked him. The same discretion was observed with
regard to Julien of whom it is well known that he has formed an
‘unfortunate’ attachment and has practically not the right to marry.
Florian was jilted years ago, and is shy and distrustful of the sex,
which is a great pity, as he is the kind of man born for fireside and
nursery joys, and would make a wife very happy.

Of Augustin and Fabian it may be truly said that ‘the more they have
known of the others, the less they will settle to one;’ and indeed I
fear they have spoilt themselves for matrimony, unless there is truth in
the old saying that a reformed rake makes the best husband. Endymion is
altogether too ineligible, his blue eyes and broad shoulders being his
only fortune; he makes plenty of capital out of these adjuncts: they
bring him in a rich return of feminine favour, but are nevertheless
hardly sufficient to support a wife.

Claudian is really anxious to marry, but suffers from a fatal
faithlessness and, as he engagingly explains, can’t love a girl long
enough to get the preliminaries settled. One day he is sure to be caught
by some determined and probably very unsuitable woman and led reluctant
to the altar. Galahad won’t marry until he has found ‘the one woman,’
and I fear he will prove a husband wasted, for poor Galahad already
wears spectacles and a bald spot; his devotion to an unrealisable ideal
bids fair to spoil his life.

When I put the question to Aurelian, he smiled his evil smile, which
makes him more like an embittered vulture than ever, and remarked that
he was thinking over his offers and hadn’t yet decided which was the
best. As the fact that he has been refused by seven women is well-known,
we really rather admire the persistence of his pose as a lady-killer.
He has even been known to write passionate letters to himself, in an
assumed hand, and drop cleverly-manufactured tears here and there upon
them, to give an air of greater realism to these amorous masterpieces,
which he uses as a proof of his wild stories of conquest. When dry, the
tears look most life-like; of course it is a dodge that every schoolgirl
knows, but I have never known a man have recourse to it before, and hope
never to again!

Both Cyprian and Valerian gave as the reason for their continued
bachelorhood, the fact that they were too comfortable as bachelors and
had never felt the need of a wife. The latter added that if he could
find just _the_ girl, he would think it over, but as matters stood he
preferred certainty to chance and was taking no risks. Between
ourselves, both these two are very self-satisfied and egotistical
persons, and I don’t think any woman has lost much by their resolve.

The fourteenth man was Bayard, who belongs to a very exasperating type
of philanderer. Most women of the world have met and been bored by him
to their sorrow. It is his grievous habit to go about professing a
yearning for matrimony of the most ideal kind, and confiding at great
length to safely attached young matrons how he longs to find a home in
one good woman’s heart, and what a great, pure, passionate, wild love he
is capable of. There is something rather engaging about him, and his
pose is naturally very attractive to unsuspecting spinsters. He is
always getting desperately entangled, but makes a great parade of his
poverty when the _affaire_ reaches the critical point, and wriggles out
successfully--generally without any too unpleasant explanation. If,
however, things have gone too far for this, he can always make good his
escape under cover of the ‘I love you too much, darling, to drag you
down to poverty’ plea. How many girls, wounded to the heart’s core, have
listened to this hoary lie when they are more than willing to be poor,
if but with him, willing to economise and save, and forego for his sake.

Not, of course, that Bayard and his like inspire such devotion; I mean
that the essentials of this particular excuse are given by very many
unmarried men nowadays as the reason of their single state. Generally
speaking, there are two main reasons why men do not marry: 1. Because
they have not yet met a woman they care for sufficiently; 2.--and these
constitute a large majority--because they are too selfish. Of course men
don’t spell it that way. Like Bayard, they say they ‘can’t afford it.’
They think of all the things they would have to give up--how difficult
it is to get enough for their pleasure now, how impossible it would be
then, with the support of a wife and potential family added; how they
would hate having to knock off poker, find a cheaper tailor, and
economise in golf balls. They shudder at the prospect, and decide in the
expressively vulgar parlance of the day that it’s ‘not good enough.’ The
things that are beyond price are weighed against the things that are
bought with money--and found wanting!

It would, however, be the last word of foolishness to encourage
improvident marriages, already a source of so much misery, and of course
my remarks do not apply to the genuine poverty of the man who really
cannot afford to wed. For him I have a very real sympathy, since he is
missing the best things of life probably through no fault of his own.
The above strictures are intended solely for the man of moderate means,
who could afford to marry if he loved himself less and some woman more.
Five hundred a year, for instance, is a comfortable income for a
bachelor not in the inner circle of Society. On this sum a middle-class
man can do himself well, provided he has no particularly expensive vices
or hobbies--but it certainly means self-denial when stretched to provide
for a wife and two or three children. It means a small house in one of
the cheaper suburbs, instead of a bachelor flat in town, ’buses instead
of cabs, upper boxes instead of stalls, a fortnight _en famille_ at
Broadstairs instead of a month’s fishing _en garçon_ in Norway. It means
no more suppers at the Savoy, no more week-ends in Paris, no more
‘running’ over to Monte Carlo; but it _can_ be done, and done happily,
provided a man puts love above luxuries. Almost every man can afford to
marry--the right woman!

Of course, if a man has still to meet the woman of his fancy, all is
well, but it is the despicable plea of Bayard that so incenses me. If
men would own the truth, it would not be so bad, but, Adam-like, as
usual, they lay the blame on women and say: ‘Girls expect so much
nowadays, it is impossible to make enough money to satisfy them.’ This
is one of the many lies men tell about women, or perhaps they are under
a delusion and really believe the statement to be true. Let them be
undeceived, girls _don’t_ expect so much; they are perfectly willing to
be poor, as I have said before, if only they care for the man enough. At
anyrate, once they have reached that stage of wanting the real things of
life they would sooner have wifehood and comparative poverty than ease
and empty hearts in their parents’ home. They would sooner, in short,
be ‘tired wives than restful spinsters.’

Another delusion men spread about women is that they’re too fond of
pleasure to settle down. How often one hears statements such as ‘Juno
Jones wouldn’t make a good wife, she’s out all day playing golf;’ or
‘I couldn’t afford to marry Sappho Smith, she’s too fond of dress and
theatre-going.’ God bless the man! What else have the poor girls to do?
Sappho has a taste for dainty clothes and a love for the theatre; she
fills her empty existence with these things as far as she can; Juno has
nothing in the wide world to do all day long, but she loves the open
air, and so concentrates her magnificent energies on a game with a stick
and ball, because any active part in the great game of life is denied
her. Marry her--if she will have you--and see what a grand comrade she
will make, and what splendid children she will bear you. Or marry
Sappho, and you will find she will never want any but simple pleasures
within your means, as long as you are kind to her and adore her as she
requires to be adored. She will cheerfully make her own clothes, and
find her greatest joy in planning out your income and adorning your
home.

Everyone can recall having known frivolous and pleasure-loving girls
settle down into admirable wives whose nurseries are models and whose
households are beyond reproach. Doubtless their friends all predicted
disaster when these butterflies were led to the altar. I honestly
believe women only want extravagant pleasures when they are miserable.
It is generally the wretched wives, the unhappy, restless spinsters who
run up bills and fling away money. They feel that life is cheating them
and they must have some compensations.

But to return to my fifteen bachelors. There only remains Florizel,
whose attitude towards wedlock is a blend of that of Bayard and
Claudian. He is genuinely eager to marry, ardent, affectionate, anxious
to do right, but lacking in moral courage and egotistical to the point
of disease. I would much like to see him happily wedded, as he then
would doubtless quickly lose that intense self-centredness, but I
question if any attractive woman exists who would be unselfish enough to
cope with him in his present state of egomania. His mind is always
inflamed with some woman or other, and he hovers about on the edge of
desperate _amours_, anxious to fall head over ears into the sea of love
and cast out an anchor of matrimony to hold him fast where he can swerve
no more. Unfortunately he cannot forget himself enough to take the fatal
plunge. With all his faults there is something very lovable about
Florizel, and I should like to see him knocked into shape, though it
would be a brave and patient woman who would take the task in hand.

When all the fifteen bachelors had ceased to talk about themselves and
settled down to bridge with the rest of the company, an old lady who,
like myself, preferred to be a looker-on, came and sat beside me. ‘How
they _do_ talk,’ she said! ‘But I can tell you why they don’t marry, in
six words, my dear: because they don’t fall in love! And why don’t they
fall in love? Because the girls are too eager; because the girls meet
them all the way--that’s why! I’ve seven sons, all unmarried, and _I_
know!’

   *   *   *

NOTE.--It is interesting to note that Westermarck in his _History of
Human Marriage_ quotes a number of authorities to prove that among many
ancient nations marriage was a religious duty incumbent upon all. Among
Mohammedan people generally it is still considered a duty. Hebrew
celibacy was unheard of, and they have a proverb, ‘He who has no wife is
no man.’ In Egypt it is improper and even disreputable for a man to
abstain from marriage when there is no just impediment. For an adult to
die unmarried is regarded as a deplorable misfortune by the Chinese,
and among the Hindus of the present day a man who remains single is
considered to be almost a useless member of society, and is looked upon
as beyond the pale of nature.

  WHY WOMEN DON’T MARRY

  ‘It’s a woman’s business to get married as soon as possible and a
  man’s to remain unmarried as long as he can.’ --G. BERNARD SHAW.

  ‘Marriage is of so much use to a woman, opens out to her so much
  of life, and puts her in the way of so much more freedom and
  usefulness, that whether she marry ill or well, she can hardly
  miss some benefit.’ --R. L. STEVENSON.

‘Why women don’t marry? But they do--whenever they can!’ the intelligent
reader will naturally exclaim. Not ‘whenever they get the chance,’ mark
you; no _intelligent_ reader would make this mistake, though it is a
common enough error among the non-comprehending. Most spinsters over
thirty must have winced at one time or another at the would-be genial
rallying of some elderly man relative: ‘What! you not married yet? Well,
well, I wonder what all the young men are thinking of.’ I write _some
man_ advisedly, for no woman, however cattishly inclined, however
desirous of planting arrows in a rival’s breast, would utter this
peculiarly deadly form of insult, which, strangely enough, is always
intended as a high compliment by the masculine blunderer. The fact that
the unfortunate spinster thus assailed may have had a dozen offers, and
yet, for reasons of her own, prefer to remain single, seems entirely
beyond their range of comprehension.

But the main reason why women don’t marry is obviously because men don’t
ask them. Most women will accept when a sufficiently pleasing man offers
them a sufficiently congenial life. If the offers they receive fall
below a certain standard, then they prefer to remain single, wistfully
hoping, no doubt, that the right man may come along before it is too
late. The preservation of the imaginative faculty in women, to which I
have previously alluded, doubtless accounts for many spinsters. It must
also be remembered that the more educated women become, the less likely
they are to marry for marrying’s sake as their grandmothers did.

Then there are a few women, quite a small section, who, unless they can
realise their ideal in its entirety, will not be content with second
best. By an irony of fate, it happens that these are often the noblest
of their sex. Yet another small section remain single from an honest
dislike of marriage and its duties. It is perhaps not too severe to say
that a woman who has absolutely no vocation for wifehood and motherhood
must be a degenerate, and so lacking in the best feminine instincts as
to deserve the reproach of being ‘sexless.’ This type is apparently
increasing! I shall deal with it further in Part IV.

Then there are those--I should not like to make a guess at their
number--who will marry _any_ man, however undesirable and uncongenial,
rather than be left ‘withering on the stalk.’ It is an acutely
humiliating fact that there exists no man too ugly, too foolish, too
brutal, too conceited and too vile to find a wife. _Any_ man can find
_some_ woman to wed him. In this connection, one recalls the famous
cook, who, when condoled with on the defection of a lover, replied:
‘It don’t matter; thank God I can love any man!’

One cannot help being amused by the serious articles on this subject in
feminine journals. We are gravely told that women don’t marry nowadays
because they price their liberty too high, because those who have money
prefer to be independent and enjoy life, and those who have none prefer
bravely wringing a living from the world to being a man’s slave, a mere
drudge, entirely engrossed in housekeeping, etc., etc.; and so on--pages
of it! All this may possibly be true of a very small portion of the
community, but the uncontrovertible fact remains that the principal
reason for woman’s spinsterhood is man’s indifference.

I have every sympathy with the women who wish to postpone taking up the
heavy responsibilities of matrimony till they have had what in the
opposite sex is termed ‘a fling,’ that is until they have enjoyed a
period of freedom wherein to study, to travel, to enjoy their youth
fully, to meet many men, to look life in the eyes and learn something of
its meaning. But there comes a period in the life of almost every
woman--except the aforesaid degenerate--when she feels it is time to
‘put away childish things,’ and into her heart there steals a longing
for the real things of life--the things that matter, the things that
last--wedded love and little children, and that priceless possession,
a home of one’s own.

It is the fashion nowadays to discredit the home, and it has been
jestingly alluded to by Mr Bernard Shaw as ‘the girl’s prison and the
woman’s workhouse;’ but what a wonderful sanctuary it really is!--and
exactly how much it means to a woman, only those who have felt the need
of it can tell. In our youth, home is the place where hampers come from,
where string and stamps and magazines grow on the premises, a place
generally where love is, but nevertheless essentially a place we take
for granted and for which we never dream of being grateful. Later on it
is sometimes associated with irksome duties; to some it even becomes a
place to get away from; but when we have lost it, how we long for it!
How reverently we think of each room and the things that happened there;
how we yearn in thought over the old garden and dream about the beloved
trees. No matter how mean a home it may have been, every bit of it is
sacred and dear--from the box-room, where on wet days we played at
robbers, to the toolshed, where on fine days we played at everything
under the sun. To this day if I chance on a badly-cooked potato it
almost brings tears to my eyes, not because of its badness, but because
it recalls the potatoes that three small children used to cook with
gladness and eat with silent awe, in the ashes of a bonfire, in an old
garden, long, long ago--whilst the smell of a bonfire itself makes me
feel seven years old again!

But whether she has a home with her parents or not, every normal woman
longs for a home of her own, and a girl who resents even arranging the
flowers on her mother’s dinner-table will after marriage cheerfully do
quite distasteful housework in the place she calls her own.

This passionate love of home is one of the most marked feminine
characteristics; I don’t mean love of being _at_ home, as modern women’s
tastes frequently lie elsewhere, but love of the place itself and the
desire to possess it. A great number of women marry solely to obtain
this coveted possession. As for those who don’t, the advertisement
columns of the _Church Times_, the _Christian World_, and other papers
tell a pitiful story of their need. Ladies ‘by birth’ (pathetic and
foolish little phrase!) are willing to do almost anything in return for
just a modest corner, a very subordinate place even in someone else’s
home. They will be housekeepers, servants, companions, secretaries,
helps for ‘a small salary and a home,’ and sometimes for no salary at
all. They will pack, sew, mend, teach, supervise; they offer their
knowledge of every kind, such as it is, their music, their languages,
their health and strength, their subservience and all their virtues,
real or acquired--all in return for a little food and fire, and the
sheltering of four walls, which constitute their extreme need, their
utmost desire--a home! Beautiful women, gifted and good women, sell
themselves daily just to gain a home. Even Hedda Gabler, most degenerate
of modern heroines, who shot herself rather than be a mother, sold
herself in a loveless marriage only for a home. And yet constantly we
read a list of trivial and fantastic reasons why women don’t marry!

A girl-bachelor who was compelled to spend most of her time in that
uncomfortable place technically known as ‘one’s boxes,’ once told me
that her greatest desire was a spot just big enough for a wardrobe in
which to keep her spare clothes and little possessions. She did without
a home, but she longed intensely for that wardrobe. ‘I shall have to
marry Tony soon,’ she said, ‘just for the convenience of having room for
my clothes. I don’t like him, and I want to wait till someone I do like
comes, but if ever I take him, it will be for wardrobe room, you just
see.’ I must add that ‘someone’ _did_ come, and she now possesses
several wardrobes and three bouncing babies, and Tony cuts her when he
meets her in the Park!

This home passion is even more noticeable in that class of society
usually referred to as the lower. I have occasionally employed a poor
woman who has been in service as cook since her husband died nineteen
years ago. All that time, she has ‘kept on the home,’ _i.e._ a single
room which contains her furniture. She has scarcely ever had to use the
room, except for an odd day or two, and has had to spend much of her
scanty leisure in cleaning it. For nineteen years she has paid
three-and-six a week for the room sooner than sell her furniture. The
£172 thus expended would have paid for the furniture over and over
again. The woman quite realises the absurdity of it, but ‘I simply
couldn’t part with the ’ome,’ is her explanation.

Yet another instance. Once when staying in seaside lodgings, I had the
misfortune to break a homely vessel of thick blue glass which had
evidently begun life as a fancy jam jar, but had been relegated, for
some reason obscure to me, to the proud position of mantel ‘ornament,’
if that be the term. To my surprise the worthy landlady wept bitterly
over the pieces, and when I spoke of gorgeous objects wherewith to
replace her treasure, explained snappishly: ‘Nothing won’t make it good
to me! Why, that there blue vorse was the beginning of the ’ome!’

I must ask pardon for this digression and return to the subject in hand.
The most depressing aspect of the question is that even if every man
over twenty-five were married there would be still an enormous number of
women left husbandless. This is really very serious, and is a condition
that gives rise to many evils. To make up for it as far as possible,
every man of sound health and in receipt of sufficient income ought to
marry. If it is merely ‘not good’ for man to be alone, then it is very
bad indeed for women! Every woman should have a man companion, a man to
live with--if only to take the tickets, carry the bags and get up in the
night to see what that noise is. Since society as at present constituted
does not countenance men and women living together for companionship,
then clearly every woman ought to have a husband!

Mr Bernard Shaw has written: ‘Give women the vote and in five years
there will be a crushing tax on bachelors.’ So there should be, subject
to certain qualifications of age and income; this is one of the many
matters in which we should take a lesson from the Japanese where all
bachelors over a certain age are taxed; in France too, a bill, to this
effect, is being discussed. At the time of writing, women are full of
anticipation of being speedily enfranchised, and there is a good deal of
talk about what use they will make of the vote. I regret to say that
although there have been some utterly idiotic threats to abolish that
boon to wives--the man’s club--yet so far, with one exception, nothing
has appeared in print as to the advisability of taxing bachelors. The
exception is a very interesting anonymous novel called _Star of the
Morning_, which strongly advocates such a tax, among several other
thoughtful suggestions for political reform.

It is obviously only just that the man who is doing nothing for the
State in the way of rearing a family should be taxed to relieve the man
who is. We hear so much about the falling birth-rate, and the duty of
every married couple to have a family, yet everything is done to
discourage those who do. The professional man slaving to earn, say,
£1000 a year, and bring up three or four children for the State, is
taxed exactly as much as the bachelor in receipt of the same income who
does nothing at all for the State, and can even avoid the other taxes by
being a lodger, if he choose.

But even if we eventually get reasonable legislation, which would offer
rewards instead of additional burdens to those who do their share in
keeping up the birth-rate; even if a bachelor over twenty-five became as
rare an object in these islands as an old maid in a Mohammedan country,
still there would be this enormous superfluity of spinsters. Why is it?
Why should Great Britain be regarded as a paradise of old maids? Why
should we have more spinsters than other countries? Is it because our
colonies swallow up so many men? Then why can’t they swallow up an equal
number of women? I should like this most important matter to be taken up
by the State and an Institution for Encouraging Marriage started under
State auspices. One of the duties of this institution would be to induce
numbers of suitable women to emigrate, so as to preserve the proper
balance of the sexes in the home country, and that every colonist might
have a chance to get a wife. I heard the other day of a very ordinary
colonial girl who had eleven men all wanting to marry her at once.
Eleven men! And yet there are scores of charming English girls who grow
old and soured without having had a single offer of marriage.

Another duty of the Institution for Encouraging Marriage would be to try
and reach and bring together the thousands of lonely middle-class men
and women in large towns, who are engaged at work all day and have no
means of meeting members of the opposite sex. I have just been reading
Francis Gribble’s very interesting novel, _The Pillar of Cloud_, in
which he describes the existence of half a dozen girls in ‘Stonor House’
one of those dreary barracks for homeless females engaged during the
day. The frantic desire of these girls to meet men of their own class is
painfully true, and this desire is not so much the outcome of young
women’s natural tendency to cultivate young men, but because all such
men to them are possible husbands, and marriage is the only way out from
Stonor House and the joyless existence there.

In _The Pathway of the Pioneer_ published a few years ago, Dolf Wyllarde
breaks similar ground, but her young women are more morbid and less
frankly anxious to meet men with a view to matrimony. Both books,
however, give one a good idea of the cheerless, unnatural lives led by
young middle-class women, whose relatives, if any, are far away, and who
work for their living in large towns--condemned almost inevitably to
celibacy by these unfavourable social conditions.

That large numbers of daintily-bred women should be condemned to such an
existence is the strongest possible argument in favour of the
establishment of two French institutions, viz., strictly limited
families and the system of _dots_. Of late years, the former has been
largely adopted in England, and until the latter custom also becomes the
rule, the Institution for Encouraging Matrimony could take the matter in
hand. Two or three unusually sensible philanthropists have already given
their attention to this important subject, but any movement of this
nature at once assumes too much the aspect of a matrimonial agency to be
approved by the class for whose welfare it is destined. However, the
I.F.E.M. would have to deal with this obstacle and conceal its real
intentions under another name. I am sure if its object were sufficiently
wrapped-up that refined men and women could take advantage of it without
loss of self-respect--the response to such an institution by both sexes
would be enormous. A club, ostensibly for promoting social intercourse,
might be the solution, and subscription dances, concerts, organised
excursions would not be difficult to arrange, and would make a source of
brightness and interest in many drab lives. Country branches could be
started if the thing proved a success.

One constantly sees in the newspapers proof of the fact that there are a
very large number of middle-class young men able and anxious to marry,
who lack feminine acquaintances of their own social standing from whom
to make a choice. Unfortunate _mésalliances_ are often the result, and
it seems to me a sad and wasteful thing that these uxoriously-inclined
men cannot be brought into contact with some of the thousands of young
women whose lives are passed in uncongenial toil and who are eating out
their hearts in their anxiety for a home and a husband of their own.
Until the I.F.E.M. becomes fact, here is splendid work ready to hand for
a philanthropist of infinite tact, and large, sympathetic heart. What a
chance to add to the sum of human joy! What a rich reward for the
expenditure of but a little time and money!

  IV

  THE TRAGEDY OF THE UNDESIRED

  ‘So man and woman will keep their trust,
  Till the very Springs of the Sea run dust.

  ‘Yea, each with the other will lose and win,
  For the Strife of Love’s the abysmal Strife,
  And the Word of Love is the Word of Life.

  ‘And they that go with the Word unsaid,
  Though they seem of the living, are damned and dead.’

    --W. E. HENLEY.

This is a tragedy of which few men know the existence and certainly no
man in these woman-ridden isles can ever have experienced. Men always
treat with derision the woman anxious for matrimony, and gibe equally at
the spinster who fails to attain it. Heaven alone knows why, since by
men’s laws and traditions the married state has been made to mean
everything desirable for a woman, and the unmarried condition everything
undesirable. ‘People think women who do not want to marry unfeminine;
people think women who do want to marry immodest; people combine both
opinions by regarding it as unfeminine for women not to look longingly
forward to wifehood as the hope and purpose of their lives, and
ridiculing and contemning any individual woman of their acquaintance
whom they suspect of entertaining such a longing. They must wish and
not wish; they must not give, and certainly must not withhold,
encouragement--and so it goes on, each precept cancelling the last,
and most of them negative.’[1]

    [Footnote 1: Augusta Webster.]

Both Mr Bernard Shaw and Mr George Moore have stated in print that women
frequently propose to men, and several men have confided in me details
of the proposals they have received from forward fair ones. I believe it
is one of the tenets of advanced women that the sex that bears the child
has a right to choose the husband. Although unpleasantly revolutionary
this seems eminently sane. That the right to choose a mate should be
open to all adults, instead of being the sole privilege of the most
selfish and least observant sex, will possibly be acknowledged in the
future, when the woman question shall be set at rest for ever.

In those far-off days there will, let us hope, be no more tragedy of
the undesired. It seems almost indelicate to apply this phrase to the
noble army of British spinsters, for the most part dignified, worthy
women, comprising ratepayers, householders, philanthropists,
mothers-in-all-but-fact--working parochially, among the poor, in
hospitals, schools, homes, offices, and studios--on public bodies,
on the staff of newspapers--generally cheerful and helpful, sometimes
clever, often charming, occasionally a little narrow perhaps, but on the
whole upholding the best traditions of their sex, and of course _never_
admitting that they would like to have married. Deep in their own
hearts, however, almost all of them must feel the sadness of their
unfulfilment, comfort themselves how they may with other interests.
Those that have engrossing occupations should be thankful, for the woman
whose whole heart is set on finding a husband and who fails to attain
this object generally becomes fretful, bitter, disappointed and useless
in every way. But women whose minds are sufficiently broad to hold other
ideals than the matrimonial one find other work to do, and do it capably
and faithfully. Loving and sympathetic women are always wanted. Marriage
is not essential to such a woman’s life, though it may be to the highest
development of her happiness.

Again, the large number of women who have had chances of marrying can
comfort themselves that they chose to be single for their ideal’s
sake--or for whatever the reason was. Larger still is the number of
those possessing the non-marrying temperament of which Bernard Shaw has
written: ‘Barren--the Life-Force passes it by.’ This rarely troubles
them; they have a host of minor pleasures and interests which suffice;
no storms of feeling, no pangs of stifled mother-longing ruffle the
placid surface of their lives. The real tragedy of the undesired does
not touch either of these classes; it is reserved in all its poignancy
for those who belong to the type of the _grande amoureuse_, whom lack of
opportunity generally, lack of attractiveness sometimes, has prevented
from fulfilling the deepest need of their nature.

I once met at a hotel on the Riviera an elderly spinster who was always
incredibly depressed. However bravely shone the sun, however fair seemed
the world in that fairest spot, nothing had the power to cheer her.
I tried once to get her to join in an excursion which a party of us were
going to make on donkey-back to a neighbouring village in the hills, but
she refused. Another time I invited her to accompany me to the rooms at
Monte Carlo, but she again refused, and after several well-meant efforts
on my part to cheer her had led to the same result, the poor soul told
me in hesitating words that she shunned gay places and lively
gatherings. ‘They always make me discontented and remind me of what I
might have had; it brings home to me the--what shall I call it?--the
_tragedy of the might-have-been_.’ I understood what she meant, and no
further words on the subject passed between us, much to my relief, as
confidences of this nature are very painful to both sides. My readers
will probably despise this poor lady as morbid, selfish and unbalanced.
Possibly they are right, but the sadness of an empty heart, a lonely
life, was the cause of her warped nature. Fortunately hers is an extreme
case; the majority of spinsters I imagine can take a delight in seeing
girls happy, and are generally deeply interested in the love affairs of
others. I recall a beautiful line of Fiona Macleod’s to the effect that
‘a secret vision in the soul will hallow life.’ This will suffice to
keep many spinsters happy--the memory of some love and tenderness,
a romance of some kind to sweeten life; women need it.

To give another instance: a woman once asked me why men fell in love.
‘I wonder if you can tell me what it is about women that makes men
propose to them,’ she said. ‘I’ve known numbers of plain women married
and numbers of penniless ones, and some quite horrid ones without a
single quality likely to make a man happy, yet there must have been
_something_ about them that attracted--some reason for it.’

She went on to tell me in such a pathetic way how she longed to have a
home and a ‘nice, kind man,’ to care for her, and yet no man had ever
asked her; no man had ever desired her or looked on her with love; she
had never known the clasp of a man’s passionate arms, nor the ecstasy of
a lover’s kiss. It seemed very strange to me, strangely painful and
horribly humiliating. I could scarcely bear to look at her while she
told me these things.

‘I would make a man so happy,’ she said, and her mournful dark eyes
filled with tears; she had rather fine eyes, and was quite a
nice-looking woman with a most sweet and gentle manner. ‘I would be so
good to him,’ she went on; ‘I’d simply live for him. I try to put it out
of my mind, but as I grow older, and it’s more hopeless, I think of it
more and more and sometimes I feel I shall go mad with the misery of it.
The future is so utterly grey and it’s all so unjust. I’m so fitted for
love, and now my life’s going and I’ve had nothing, _nothing_!’

She wept bitterly and I wept too in sympathy with her. Curiously enough,
this woman was not only attractive, as I have said, and anxious to
please, and thoroughly feminine, but she had had ample opportunities of
meeting men. I suppose she lacked what the Scotch peasant-woman called
the ‘_come hither in the ’ee_’--some subtle sex-magnetism which had been
possessed by those ‘plain, penniless, and horrid women’ whom she talked
about. Or perhaps it was that the ‘will to live’ was absent and
therefore no mate came to the woman.

There are thousands of women who feel the same, though in most cases
they would scorn to own it. We hear a good deal of man’s right to live;
what about woman’s right to love? Women are so constituted that the need
for loving and being loved is the strongest factor of their being, the
essential of their existence. All over the country there are lonely
women of every class, leisured and working women, pretty and plain, good
and bad, who are hungering and thirsting for love, for a man to take
care of them, for the right to wifehood and the thrice blessed right to
motherhood. In the Press the parrot cry of men echoes ceaselessly:
‘Women shouldn’t meddle in politics; women shouldn’t do this or
that--let them mind their homes and their children.’ But the restless
women who do these things have generally no homes or children to mind;
what is the use of preaching the sacredness of motherhood when you will
not allow them to be mothers? To what end prate of the duties of
wifehood when you do not ask them to be wives?

It is a well-known physiological fact that numbers of women become
insane in middle life who would not have done so if they had enjoyed the
ordinary duties, pleasures and preoccupations of matrimony--if their
women’s natures had not been starved by an unnatural celibacy. This is
not a suitable subject to go into here, but I recommend it to the
attention of my more thoughtful readers and those who concern themselves
with the amelioration of the wretched social conditions of our glorious
twentieth-century civilisation.

Hardest of all is the case of the woman who longs not merely for
wifehood and ‘a kind man,’ but more especially for motherhood, the
bitter-sweet crown of the sex that celibate priests preach ceaselessly
as woman’s first duty and highest good, but which thousands of women in
this country are debarred from fulfilling! Surely no bitterness must
be so poignant as the bitterness of the woman who longs for
motherhood--ceaselessly in her ears the Life Force is calling, and deep
in her heart the dream children are stirring, crying, ‘Give us life!
give us life!’ becoming more importunate every year, as each year finds
the divine possibilities unrealised.

I often think how everything combines to torment a generous-hearted,
full-blooded, mother-woman whose nature is starved thus. She has, of
course, to suppress all emotion on the subject, to hold her head high,
and endure with a smile the ‘experienced’ airs of girls, much younger
than herself, who happen to wear that magical golden ring that changes
all life for a woman; to pretend generally that she has no wish to
marry, never had, and could have if she chose, to laugh at this page if
she should happen to read it, and call the writer a morbid idiot--in
short, she always has to act a part before a world which professes to
find exquisitely humorous the fact of a woman being cheated out of the
birthright of her sex. Every paper and book she picks up nowadays
contains some reference to the glories of motherhood, the joys of love.
Music, pictures, novels and plays, all speak of sex fulfilled and
triumphant, not starved and denied like hers. The same principle is
everywhere in Nature--the sky, the sea, the flowers, the green trees,
the sound of summer rain--all beautiful sights and sounds have the same
meaning, the same burden, the same sharp sting for her. If she is
inclined to be morbid, every child’s face seen in the street turns the
knife in the wound; every sweet baby’s cooing is another pang. ‘Not for
me--not for me!’ must be the perpetual refrain in her mind. Her arms are
empty, her heart is cold; she belongs to the vast, sad army of the
undesired.

_Do you wonder the madhouses are full of single women?_

   *   *   *

NOTE.--A clever and delightful friend of mine, a spinster by choice,
takes exception to my views on the single estate. I should be deeply
grieved if any words of mine were to cause pain to other women. I have
said before that some of the best women are spinsters, which is sad to a
believer in marriage like myself. Two of the sweetest and noblest women
I know are unmarried; one of them especially seems absolutely without a
thought of self, and has worked hard for others all her life, giving her
powers of brain and body to their utmost limit, and the treasures of her
beautiful heart generously and without stint. I beg my readers to note
that I have tried to differentiate between those spinsters who do not
want to marry and those who do; between the rich spinster who can
command all the amenities of life, and the poor one compelled to a
relentless and unceasing round of uncongenial toil. Still more do I wish
to distinguish between the placid contented woman who can adapt herself
to circumstances and find a quiet sort of happiness in any life--and the
less well-balanced, more passionate natures, with deeper desires and an
imperious need of loving. It is this need of loving stifled, crushed and
fought against that awakens my profound compassion--a compassion which
my friend informs me is wasted and misplaced. My readers must judge.

  PART II

  CAUSES 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._

  THE VARIOUS KINDS OF MARRIAGE

  ‘Marriage is the great mistake that wipes out the smaller
  stupidities of Love.’ --SCHOPENHAUER.

In one 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 Mr Somerset Maugham’s characters in
_The Merry-Go-Round_ says: ‘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 trust Nature 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 necessity _to
give_ themselves--_to possess_ the 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 all between them except
the memory of the madness that has died. Fortunately this is by no means
always the case, but when it is a 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 beneath its ashes. ‘Real friendship,’ founded on harmony
of sentiment, does not exist until the instinct of sex has been
extinguished.[2]

    [Footnote 2: Schopenhauer’s _Metaphysics of Love_.]

   *   *   *

_Marriages of Convenience_ are 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 sentimental point 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 to make 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 Marriages_ seem 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 never _drift_ into 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 in _Man and Superman_, where he
also expresses his conviction that ‘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 you know any thoroughly happy
couples?’ says one of the characters in _Double 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 be happy
thro’ 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
a horrid 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 word _Affection_ in 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 and inglorious 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 ask _me_ how 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.

  II

  WHY 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.

We have 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 they _do_ get 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 asked after 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 the greatest 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 the house 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 is rife 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 and
_vice versâ_ but 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 to assume 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 the last 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
youngest girl 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 of restful 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 was never 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-chair_
closeness 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 does _not_ exist, 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 de la Rochfoucauld who 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. Yet _during_ the 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 to do 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 does not work at
_something_. 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.

  THE 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 great many 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 by every means in its
power, regardless of the high percentage of illegitimate births which is
the direct consequence.[3]

    [Footnote 3: In 1903 one tenth of all the children born in France
    were illegitimate. In Paris alone the percentage was higher
    still--about one in every four.]

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!

  IV

  WILD 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.

If there 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
immortal _Candida_, 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 no _feminine_ wild 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 the age 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
her _fiancé_.

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 dangerous
_affaires_, and might have come to serious grief had 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 no _fun_
in 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 girl _of
more or less the same type_ whose first 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 can _she_ be sure that _your_
last 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 things _for yourself_, and
as they would seem, say, at the edge of an active volcano! . . . All the
things we fuss so much about would 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 never _never_ to 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 between them. 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, and many men take respondent _divorcées_ to
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 of adoring 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 is _in all
probability_ in 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 to keep them, each to him or her
self. A very good motto for the newly betrothed would be that of Tom
Broadbent in _John Bull’s Other Island_--‘Let us have no
tellings--perfect confidence, but no tellings: that’s the way to avoid
rows!’

  V

  A PLEA FOR THE WISER TRAINING OF GIRLS

If girls 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 they certainly 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 that _all love_, even the
romantic love which occupies so large a portion of their dreams,
_springs from the instinct of sex_?[4] This may be thought a dangerous
lesson, but the present policy of silence on this subject is far more
dangerous, inducing as it does a tendency to brood over the forbidden
theme.

    [Footnote 4: Schopenhauer’s _Metaphysics of Love_.]

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 a _natural_ and _ordinary_ fact,
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 called _Woman 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.’ . . . ‘Some
very 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 hold
_unqualified_ motherhood up to girls as their noblest ideal. Nor does
any thoughtful individual believe that maternity is woman’s _only_
destiny. But as to _highest_ (_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, _is_ a ‘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 when
the 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, must necessarily 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 of _both_ sexes 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.

‘And keep 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 amazing complacency 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, whom no 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 his wife, 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 would prove
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 frightful of 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 the _ménage_ in 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’; the news 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, which remains 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 III

  SUGGESTED ALTERNATIVES

  ‘For me the only remedy to the mortal injustices, to the endless
  miseries, to the often incurable passions which disturb the union of
  the sexes, is the liberty of breaking up conjugal ties and forming
  them again.’  --GEORGE SAND.

  ‘Until the marriage tie is made more flexible, marriage will always
  be a risk, which men particularly will undertake with misgiving.’
    --H. B. MARRIOTT-WATSON.

  LEASEHOLD MARRIAGE À LA MEREDITH

  ‘Twenty years of Romance make a woman look like a wreck; twenty
  years of Marriage make her look like a public building.’
    --OSCAR WILDE.