Chart II. DURATION OF MARRIAGE UP TO TIME OF FILING PETITION OF DIVORCE.

The high figures for faithless wives revealed in these statistics, therefore, point to the extreme refractoriness of women under the conditions imposed by modern economic pressure, which makes the limitation of families an ineluctable rule in most homes. This is furthermore confirmed by a comparison of the high figures given for childless marriages, or marriages of only one, two, or three children, with those given for marriages which have more than three children.

On the other hand, the proportion of husbands’ petitions to wives’ in those marriages in which there are more than six children, leaves no doubt that in most of these cases not the wife but the husband was at fault, which is exactly what we should expect.

(b) It is interesting to note the steady rise in husbands’ petitions during the years 1915-1919—all years of war: the figure 4,076 as against 1,009 in 1919 constituting the most convincing evidence we have of the difficulty with which women tolerate the lack of children or the cessation of child-birth, even when it is due to the absence of their husbands on what was believed to be a “Crusade.” It seems probable that the bulk of these women must have been young, for the total number of divorces for that year, in cases where there was only one child or none, amounts to 3,965.

Of course, from my point of view, the value of these figures is lessened by the fact that it is impossible to differentiate between marriages of positive and negative couples; but perhaps the steadiness with which certain characteristic proportions are revealed in them compensates to some extent for this defect.

When we add to this Lord Salvesen’s evidence before the Royal Commission on Divorce (1912), in which he declared that in Scotland the proportion of divorces among childless couples was “immensely larger” than that among fertile couples, it can leave little doubt in our minds that, in order to be so constant and universal, this rule must be based on unalterable laws taking their root in deep physiological and psychological conditions, and that the sentimental and emotional factors can be but surface phenomena accompanying rather than affecting the operation of these laws. For, if we have been right in arguing that the presence of children does not operate as a strengthener of the union by cementing the love of married couples, but by meeting certain instinctive needs in their physical and mental constitution, it is clear that the sentimental elements in the union are the most insignificant—hence their inability to tide large numbers of positive couples over the periods of physiological and psychical stress which childlessness or the limitation of the family imposes.

(c) When we turn to Chart II and examine the figures given for the duration of the marriage up to the time when the petition was filed (for the years 1910-1919), we also note a fact that does not surprise us, and that is the immeasurably higher figures given for the four years lying between the fifth and the tenth years of marriage, than for all other periods.

It is precisely during these four years that those two disturbing forces which do most to mar modern marriages are most likely to begin to operate, viz:—

(a) The irascibility of the wife as the result of the cessation of child-birth; this irascibility showing itself in a decreasing satisfaction with her home and her husband, and an increasing interest in outside amusements and occupations, and in other men.

(b) The loss of desire for his wife, in the husband, which causes him to seek other sexual experiences.

With regard to (a) it is obvious that during the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth years of marriage, most couples who are attempting to limit their families will have ceased from procreating. They will have had from one to three children, and will have decided to have no more. The wife will therefore tend to become increasingly impatient with her lot, and ultimately make a confidant of some idiot of a man, who will interpret her marked attentions as a proof of his irresistible charm, and the two will end in what the world is pleased to call “falling in love.”

With regard to (b), six, seven, eight or nine years is a long period over which to extend the average man’s desire for fresh sexual experience, and in the event of a cessation of child-birth (which means the use of contraceptives—always unfavourable to happy marital relations) it is during these last years of his first decade of married life that he is most likely to feel the ardent desire for a change.

The two factors (a) and (b) conspiring together soon force the couple asunder, if they are positive, brave, and intolerant of conventions and rules—hence, I believe, the high figures for the period in question.

Chart III. DIVORCES ACCORDING TO PROFESSIONS.

In Chart III we have the statistics for divorce, tabulated according to the occupations of the husbands. Now, according to the 1911 census, the figures given for the total number of males engaged in three out of the nine categories is as follows:—

If we compare these total figures[95] with the corresponding figures given for the divorces in each category, we see the enormously high percentage of divorces that occur in the professional classes, as compared with both the mining and agricultural industry, and although in accounting for this conspicuous difference we have to bear in mind the facilities, chiefly financial, for procuring divorce in the professional classes, we are nevertheless confronted by a disparity which requires some explanation.

When, however, we consider the greater prevalence of birth-control among the professionals, with the inevitable unconscious disaffection that it introduces among the wives of that class; when, also, we reflect upon the more artificial circumstances in which this class lives, and the higher and less natural demands that its spouses make upon each other; when, moreover, we remember the greater irascibility and nervousness, together with the usually lower passion, of all people engaged in the more intellectual pursuits of life, which make them more prone to chafe under the many vexations to which married life gives rise, and less likely to attain that physiological serenity which is the pre-requisite of all solid contentment, these statistics seem to confirm the conclusions at which we have arrived, and, on the whole, to support the analysis we have made both of the marriage tie itself, and of the factors that conspire to loosen it.

Having dealt with divorce in so far as it concerns positive couples, I have now to deal with it in its relation to the negative man and woman. My present task is, therefore, by far the more difficult of the two, seeing that the moment we leave the uniformity of natural law and the regularity of indomitable forces, we find ourselves in a maze of possibilities, which, while they defy enumeration owing to their extreme multiplicity, also elude all effort at classification because of the infinite combinations and permutations that low health and eccentricity are capable of producing.

It must be clear that the moment the driving force of healthy, normal passion ceases to be the motive actuating male and female, the vagaries of human conduct are no longer calculable. One knows what in certain circumstances a healthy passionate animal will do. It is impossible to foretell what an unhealthy or unpassionate one will do.[96]

To describe all the possible complications that will ultimately lead a negative couple into the Divorce Court, or cause them to seek a judicial separation, or induce them to conclude that they would be happier living apart, is therefore beyond the powers of any human being. The negative man and woman, like the invalid or the eccentric, must remain an enigma, because natural laws and forces no longer operate normally or calculably in them.

Nevertheless, it is possible, in a rough way, to outline certain features which are more or less common even to sub-normal people, and from which, therefore, certain general rules of conduct may be inferred.

For instance, we may say of negative men and women that:—

(a) The physiological promptings of an instinctive and organic kind are never likely (as with their healthier brethren) to weigh very heavily with them. (The ethereal lovers who believe that marriage is a union of souls.)

(b) The sentimental and intellectual aspects of a sexual situation are more likely to determine their conduct than its vital or reproductive aspects. (The lovers in most modern novels, in which “Luvv” is supposed never to have bodily union as its aim, but only companionship, or sweet words, or pure affection, or a life of “unselfish” mutual service, or some other high-falutin’ nonsense.)

(c) The force of passion being no longer the ruling determinant in them, such factors as vanity, caution, cowardice, and even indolence, may dominate the sex impulses and direct conduct to their own ends. (The bulk of hasty marriages made during the war were of this nature, vanity both in the man and the woman giving rise in each individual to such elated feelings that these were mistaken for depth of passion.)

(d) The intellectual attitude towards love, and the passions which it tends to assume, may cause negative people to imitate without feeling the behaviour of their more passionate fellows and their love affairs, thus producing a false but fairly accurate image of true passion. (The actors in modern society, all of which are by no means professional histrions.)

Dealing with (a) first, it must be fairly obvious that where physiological promptings are feeble, deep bodily disappointments, and particularly rebuffs to the reproductive system of the women, can be tolerated very much more placidly than where physiological promptings are imperious.

Thus all negative women are likely to endure for a very much longer period a childless marriage, or a marriage in which child-birth has ceased in the first four to six years, than are their positive sisters. In all “happy” marriages of this kind, therefore, which have only terminated with the demise of one of the parties, negativeness may certainly be suspected in the woman, and, since like tends to attract like, also in the man.

When, therefore, unhappiness supervenes in such a home, other causes must be sought than the secret and unconscious revolt of the woman’s reproductive equipment, or the man’s fiery need for sexual variety.

Negativeness being the outcome of an atonic condition of the body, or, at least, of the genital organs, and negative women being less likely to function properly than their more positive sisters, there will naturally arise a tendency, in all such matches (owing to the small amount of pleasure and gratification that is derived from the whole of the physical side of marriage and motherhood), to discount the physiological side, and to exalt only states of the soul and the mind. These people will have the old maids of all Puritanical communities with them when they cast scorn upon the pleasures of the body; and as their number is increasing daily, the chorus of body-despisers grows steadily louder and louder in all the countries enjoying Western Civilization.

The women in these matches are likely to confound motherhood with self-sacrifice and martyrdom, and their husbands to confound the birth of a child with the threat of financial ruin. Science, costly and inefficient science, helps them at every step, and when finally child-birth stops, which is never too soon (for the women in any case), and nurses and perambulators take their leave, science remains to the last to try to repair or neutralize the debility that unwelcome fertility has left behind.

In their most private moments the women of such matches speak of the “horrible sensuality” of men, and of the havoc this sensuality has made of their lives; and in thought and in action they incline to everything that emphasizes the soulful or spiritual side of life. They cultivate a taste for extremely soulful literature or poetry (Maeterlinck’s Serres Chaudes, for instance) and tend to gravitate towards those forms of Christianity that are most quintessential.

Divorce, if it is ever resorted to by such couples, is usually the fault of the husbands. They may at length manifest a desire to have a breath of air untainted by sickness or debility, and in that case usually become entangled with a woman quite as negative as their wife. The women hardly ever go further than to cultivate an apparently ardent but platonic attachment to some poet, musician, or other artist, to whom they write long soulful letters, full of hints about a non-physical kind of bliss in love, which they have longed all their lives to experience. But in a large majority of cases, negative couples of precisely this kind tend to finish their days more or less tiresomely together, each bewailing the fact that such a white elephant as the body ever became associated with the more “exalted” spiritual side of man.

In regard to (b) it can only be said that the type is so very prevalent that it is becoming almost the norm of modern civilization. Its principal characteristic is that both the male and the female tend to choose each other for reasons which are as remote as possible from the body. The men of this type choose “clever,” “artistic,” sylph-like, narrow-hipped “sweet” women, with thin slender hands, spiritual interests, and probably a history of some intestinal irregularity in their past. The women, while aspiring to a high ideal of health and manliness in their mates, have not the instinct to pick out the passionate man, but usually select one, who though he may be big of body and limb, intellectual and “breezy,” is quite fireless, unpassionate and dull.

The couples belonging to this type can also endure childlessness or a cessation of child-birth with almost perfect equanimity; the man being very much more concerned about the figure he is cutting as a chivalrous, sporting mate, who observes the rules of “cricket” with his spouse, than about any other aspect of their married life. He studies with asinine perplexity the so-called inscrutable complexities of his wife’s mind, and is always making “allowances” and preaching the doctrine of give and take. His great charm, according to modern values, is the fact that he regards women as utterly incomprehensible. Women are so powerful nowadays in determining opinion, and have so often and so emphatically called the men who show some insight into women’s nature “prigs,” that at the present day both women and men unanimously call any man who voices penetrating views about woman, an out-and-out prig. In fact, in order to be a prig it is necessary to have shown some ability in analysing the true nature of woman.[97]

The women in such unions very frequently outstrip their male companions in mental nimbleness, and this disturbance of the proper balance frequently leads them, in their vague discontent, to become prominent exponents and defenders of all those claims of sex-equality and sex-levelling, which have agitated the home life of northern European countries (where most negative people are to be found) for the last hundred years. The spectacle of their lady-like and unobtrusive male, there can be no doubt, is usually the first incentive towards these kinds of activities, and, seeing that they have the constant substantiation of their claims in the tame animal with whom they cohabit, it is not surprising that they frequently enter into “Woman’s Cause” with a conviction and a fervour very much more intense than the more academic enthusiasm of the old maid who is usually their associate in the movement.

Indeed, it not infrequently happens that the “male” of these militant women is himself an active collaborator in his wife’s public work, and so complete is their intellectual and sentimental agreement on the question, that he will echo her words with the docility of a parrot.

The type (c) is also common enough and is growing more plentiful in all classes of society. It is the negative type which approximates most to the passionate, tragic type of real life and fiction; because, while it possesses no deep passions, its extreme vanity makes it capable of the wildest excesses.

In all the possible situations of married life, this type never consults any other arbiter than vanity, and it is only when its caution, cowardice or indolence can overpower its vanity that the latter does not decide the issue.

Having no real deep passion to direct them, the men and women of this type are actually drawn into marriage in the first place solely from motives of vanity, because the state of being betrothed is a state of (1) supreme importance, (2) conspicuousness, (3) intense and unscrupulous mutual worship, and (4) romantic glamour.

Their marriage is likely to be the least stable of all marriages among negative people, however, for the moment their vanity ceases to be fed, or humoured, they are likely to weary of an association that affords them ever less and less of the joys of their engaged days. Lacking the sound physiological promptings which make a fully-adapted life sufficient for their happiness and serenity, they become restless the moment (1) adulation declines from the quarter of the spouse, (2) the attention of their world ceases from being concentrated upon them, and (3) that feeling of exaltation which filled their breast during courtship—and particularly on their wedding day—shows signs of waning.

The woman in this kind of match finds out soon after marriage that while she has become the mistress of her own home, she is living in an atmosphere which, compared with that she had grown accustomed to in the days when her matchmaking mother directed her life, and during the months or years of her courtship, is depressingly deficient in appeals to her vanity.

Her husband is securely bound to her by law. His first raptures are over, and the two seem to be settling down to a hum-drum existence, in which those deep thrills of yore seem entirely to have gone from her life. But precisely those thrills were the breath of her nostrils. All the joys of marital intimacy with the man she “loves” do not make up for the loss of that. Her body is not tonic or vital enough to provide any comfort for the exaltation her vanity once afforded her.

She therefore contrives so to modify her hum-drum existence as to restore to it some of the atmosphere of her late adolescence and the days of her courtship. She goes in search of company; she insists on men coming to the house. She sings, or acts, or goes in for sports—all with a view to restoring that atmosphere in which she became engaged. In the end, she easily finds some idiot of a man who will be ignorant and vain enough to court her, and when this happens she will at last breathe deeply again.

These courtships which the vain negative woman contrives to bring about, in order to feed her vanity, may or may not lead to adultery. Frequently they do, because, although she is certainly not actuated by passion in contriving them, she may by chance light upon a paramour who is passionate, and then, in order to prolong the farce, she finds she must yield to his importunacies. Indeed, unless she do yield, the whole of the realistic nature of the love affair, which she has done her best to impart to the experience, will be destroyed. Thus, despite her lack of real passion, this kind of vain adulteress frequently finds herself in the Divorce Court, with the most damning evidence against her, when all the time she has never desired the illicit consummation. What was necessary—nay, essential—to her, was the breath of adulation, not the final embrace of the procreator. She wanted a life that was a long courtship, because courtship is the time when vanity receives its strongest appeals. As, however, she could hardly simulate une grande passion without actually appearing desirous of the consummation, her first marriage is ruined.

Very frequently indeed these women do not allow the consummating step to be taken. Not being at all disposed to it physically, their caution, their cowardice, and their indolence easily get the upper hand, and they ultimately disappoint their expectant lover; but as a rule this happens only when they have squeezed him dry of every possible flattering epithet and attention.

But, the reader will object, as far as behaviour and results are concerned, where is the difference here between the negative woman acting on the impulse of vanity, and the positive woman acting on the impulse of passion?

To judge from the evidence heard in the Divorce Court, the difference is admittedly slight. There is the same dissatisfaction with the home and the mate, leading to the same longing for amusements and activities of all kinds which promise a chance of variety. In actual practice, however, the differences are marked. The positive woman goes about the business with more solemn, even sullen determination. She does not smile, laugh, and frivol about it as the negative woman does. The latter betrays her immediate aim, which is the satisfaction of vanity, by her extreme enjoyment of every step along her irregular path. She enjoys the mere means to an end, which supply the gratification that her vanity needs. The former, having only the end in view, accepts the means as a necessary preliminary, but these means obviously leave her much more unmoved than they do her negative sister.

Thus negative women are notoriously what the French call grimacières. They proclaim their true nature by the perpetual grin that distorts their features throughout the whole period in which they receive attentions from their worshipper. Deep passion does not grin in this way. It is either too deeply stirred, or it is too shy, to make an open exhibition of its feelings. Besides, it is greatly agitated and anxious about the issue.

The vain, negative woman, moreover, is always conscious of an observing public when she is in the company of her admirer, and her triumphant glances at onlookers in such circumstances are a sort of challenge to them to contemplate her in the full intensity of her joy. Part of the gratification of her vanity consists in drawing the envious looks of other women upon her. Hence, too, her perpetual grin, a good deal of which is meant for public notice. The positive woman, on the other hand, is too deeply interested, too seriously concerned, to be able to give a thought to the onlookers. She may even shun the crowd. In her, everything is subordinated to the principal end she has in view.

The vain, negative woman, moreover, because she does not really desire the man who happens to be worshipping her, will brook no breach of manners, of chivalry, of steady worship from him. She is constantly on the alert and vigilant. She keeps him up to the mark, and will quickly rap his knuckles if the incense he is burning at the altar of her self-esteem is the least bit stale, or burns with only a moderate fury, or is swung with any sign of diminished zeal. The passionate woman, on the other hand, will bear anything from the man she really desires, except—absence.

The vain woman’s hatred is roused, not by a refusal to cohabit with her, but by a noticeable lameness in her worshipper’s flattering fluency. She hates those who wound her vanity, not those who cheat her will to Life and its multiplication. She will become homicidal only if she is made to look small or ridiculous, not if she is left sterile. She loathes situations in which she cannot make a display of her bliss.

The positive woman, on the other hand, longs for privacy and secrecy, and forgives nothing less easily than a lack of virile ardour in her male pursuer. He may be silent to the point of dumbness, inarticulate to the point of being unable to apologise when he spills his soup over her dress at table;—all these things she overlooks if he has the first pre-requisite of Life, which is virile ardour rising to impatient and restless importunacy. On the other hand, the worshipper who spills his soup over his negative mistress’s dress in a restaurant or any public assembly, would thenceforward be loathed on that account alone. Because it is mortifying to one’s vanity to be made ridiculous in public.

The negative man of this class is of the cold Don Juan type, who gratifies his vanity more than his sexual appetite by repeated conquests. He too soon tires of his wife and of his home. He does this all the more readily, seeing that his marriage itself has usually been quite an unintended consummation on his part of one of the many flirtations his vanity led him into in early manhood, and that he has been chafing ever since it was finally settled at the thought of the many conquests he might have made before taking the final step.

His nostrils, too, yearn for the hot breath of adulation. He is a tormentor of positive women, because he can so readily hold himself aloof at the last station before the terminus.

If this man becomes unfaithful, it will be because his enormous vanity has overcome his caution. In order to extract the last and most enthralling confession from a young woman’s heart—which will cause him to reach his highest pinnacle of exaltation—one day he will go too far, either in his protestations or in his caresses,[98] and then, if he is dealing with the kind of girl or woman who knows of no facile retreat from such avowals, and who is really in earnest, he will find himself impelled in a direction and to an end which he can truthfully swear he never had in contemplation at the outset.

The fact that the law of England deals too lightly with this kind of dandified scoundrel (for such men almost always dress well) is due not merely to the fact that, generally speaking, it is grotesquely lenient to correspondents as a class, but also to its inability to distinguish between the adultery of the negative man and woman, whose misdemeanour is the outcome of vanity alone, and whose ruin of another’s home is, therefore, wanton and unnecessary, and the adultery which is the outcome of genuine passion, and which, therefore, partakes far more of that quality of human action which is elemental and inevitable.

This man only becomes tragic under a snub. He finds no infinite resource in a deep knowledge of his own value, and is, therefore, incapable of self-consolation when shown the cold-shoulder. Hence the woman who does not fall in with his scheme of mutual worship, incurs his homicidal loathing. She destroys his joie de vivre, his very primum mobile, the source of his will to live. His career is a series of escapes from female fires he has deliberately kindled; but he is always more ready to forgive a burn than the fuel that refuses to flare up under the power of his bellows.

Before concluding section (c) perhaps it would be advisable and also helpful to give a brief analysis of the psychological forces which impel the negative, vain man and woman along their career of vanity-gratification at all costs. For, while to understand them will be in a measure to exonerate them, it will also serve as a means of recognizing their type when we see it.

Now the fundamental truth to be grasped about vanity is that it is always found in conjunction with modesty. It is the intense modesty of the vain person that forces him to gratify his vanity at every turn.

What, then, is modesty? In ultimate practice it amounts to an inability to set a value on oneself, an inability to place oneself according to one’s worth in the graduated hierarchy of human beings. The modest man waits to be given his place, to be told where he stands, to be priced and valued by his fellow-men. Compliments mean a good deal to him, because, since he has no settled opinion of himself, they promote his self-esteem. In short, his self-esteem fluctuates according to his receipts in compliments and abuse. And since his good spirits depend largely upon his self-esteem, his spirits may also be said to fluctuate according to these receipts. Unlike his proud brother, he does not hold a good or poor opinion of himself because of an inner conviction of his worth, which is settled; he holds it because he has been modest enough to wait for the world to give it to him.

But this makes him entirely dependent upon his fellow-men for his knowledge of his worth, and consequently for the condition of his spirits. By throwing him always upon the judgment of his fellows for his opinion of himself and his good spirits, his modesty therefore tends to lead the modest man into the constant practice of trying to seduce his fellow-men to such an opinion of himself as will not cause his spirits to suffer. He covets good opinions, because on them alone can his self-esteem, and therefore his good spirits, thrive. In order to enjoy that comfortable feeling of satisfaction which promoted self-esteem affords, he is constantly tempted to persuade his fellow-men into giving it to him. This makes him amenable, and what the modern world calls “lovable,” because he glows under compliments, and becomes pliable and susceptible to influence, and by the side of him his proud inflexible brother appears to the modern world as cold and inaccessible.[99] The vain man asks: “What did So-and-so say of me?” or “What did So-and-so think of me?” And according to the answer he receives he is either happy or depressed.

The proud man does not care what So-and-so thinks of him. He is not concerned with public opinion. He knows his own good and bad points, and no views about himself, entertained by his fellows, can modify that knowledge one way or the other. Consequently he is not always busy trying to seduce his circle of relatives, friends, and acquaintances into a good opinion of him. This makes him stiff, independent, unamenable, and dignified—in fact, everything that the modern world is least able to tolerate with patience.

The modest man lives in his neighbour’s views of himself. He depends on them for his self-esteem, and therefore for his joie de vivre. On these views he measures his worth. It is only human, therefore, that he should be anxious to make them as favourable as possible.

Now it is this constant effort to make these views as favourable as possible, and the pleasure he feels over the success of his efforts, that constitute the characteristic known as “vanity,” for which the modest man is notorious. It is obvious that when no other deeper motives interfere—as in the case of all those people whom I call negative, and whose physiological or bodily promptings are hardly audible—vanity very soon becomes the only mainspring of action. It constitutes the only tribunal before which life’s alternatives are drawn for examination; and, according to whether vanity promises to be gratified or not by a certain course, that course is adopted or rejected.

When I say, therefore, that these vain, modest and negative people approximate nearest to the passionate, tragic type, it will readily be seen why this must be so. For to snub or to withhold your good opinion from the vain man or woman, is not only an offence in itself, it also deprives that man or woman of self-esteem for the time being. They depend on your good opinion of them for their good opinion of themselves. Not to give them your good opinion is, therefore, tantamount to destroying their joie de vivre for the time being; it amounts to depriving them of their mainspring, which is gratified vanity. But this is as good as killing them. Until they can find someone, or think of someone, who can cancel out your poor opinion of them, by a more exalted opinion, they are, therefore, desperate. They hate with a homicidal hatred (vain people never forgive anyone who has mortified their vanity), and this makes them tragic. Tragedy among vain negative people is always to be traced to wounded vanity, and never to passion. The constant mistake made by the modern world is to confound the passionate crime with the crime that arises from vanity.[100] But the passionate crime is of a different order of rank altogether. It is always a crime arising out of an affront against Life itself, whereas the crime that springs from vanity is always the result of the much more insignificant fact that somebody’s good opinion of himself has been assailed.[101]

In class (d) we also have a very large and growing section of the population, particularly among the middle classes. It consists of people, not unlike the former, but who know exactly what real passion does, and how it does it, and who proceed to ape it in every momentous incident of their lives. They are negative and therefore have no genuine promptings from passion; but they read and observe a good deal, and they emulate their passionate fellows with a pertinacity worthy of a better purpose. They will fall in love, marry, commit adultery, divorce, and even commit murder, provided that they can convince themselves that each successive step has been taken in the grand style. And, as they proceed through their various metamorphoses, they watch themselves with the double interest of participators and spectators of a great drama.

Of the whole negative class it may be said that they are radically unstable in marriage, because they are not actuated by any natural passion or impulse, and therefore do not become wedded to any environment where their instincts find perfect adaptation. On the other hand, however, they are frequently able, owing to this very lack of natural passion, to endure for a lifetime matrimonial unions which would be intolerable to the positive type for a month, and this accounts for the fact that, in England particularly, there are so many peaceful lifelong unions of couples who are childless and doomed to childlessness.

The most constant characteristic of all negative people, however, is this, that they are always prepared, and able, to silence the natural passions (because in them these forces are so feeble) and to direct their conduct according to any conceivable rule other than that of these natural passions. Thus opportunism, vanity, an eye to the main chance, love of display, histrionic tastes, indolence, caution, cowardice—each one of these factors may at different moments direct their lives; but true passion certainly never will, and the very fact that it cannot, they will dress in every form of high-falutin’ euphemism. They will call their lack of passion, self-control, or strength of will; they will describe it as ordinary common decency; they will even have the impudence to call it simply “good breeding,” and sometimes they will have the duplicity and arrogance to call it purity.