stays them. In my early days, desiring to improve my prose, I
served for a year or so as reporter for a newspaper in a police court,
and during that time I heard perhaps four hundred cases of so-called
wife-beating. The husbands, in their defence, almost invariably
pleaded justification, and some of them told such tales of
studied atrocity at the domestic hearth, both psychic and physical,
that the learned magistrate discharged them with tears in his eyes
and the very catchpolls in the courtroom had to blow their noses.
Many more men than women go insane, and many more married
men than single men. The fact puzzles no one who has had the
same opportunity that I had to find out what goes on, year in and
year out, behind the doors of apparently happy homes. A woman,
if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so
sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems
sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps
Almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary
man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The
hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and
stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of
a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and
summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in
amour--all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest.
To be the object of the oafish affections of such a creature, even
when they are honest and profound, cannot be expected to
give any genuine joy to a woman of sense and refinement. His
performance as a gallant, as Honor de Balzac long ago observed,
unescapably suggests a gorilla's efforts to play the violin. Women
survive the tragicomedy only by dint of their great capacity for
play-acting. They are able to act so realistically that often they
deceive even themselves; the average woman's contentment, indeed,