Whether that compromise be a sign of his relative stupidity or of his
relative cowardice it is all one: the two things, in their symptoms
and effects, are almost identical. In the first case he marries because
he has been clearly bowled over in a combat of wits; in the second
he resigns himself to marriage as the safest form of liaison. In both
cases his inherent sentimentality is the chief weapon in the hand of
his opponent. It makes him [caroche] the fiction of his enterprise,
and even of his daring, in the midst of the most crude and obvious
operations against him. It makes him accept as real the bold
play-acting that women always excel at, and at no time more than
when stalking a man. It makes him, above all, see a glamour of
romance in a transaction which, even at its best, contains almost as
much gross trafficking, at bottom, as the sale of a mule.


A man in full possession of the modest faculties that nature
commonly apportions to him is at least far enough above idiocy to
realize that marriages a bargain in which he gets the worse of it,
even when, in some detail or other, he makes a visible gain. He
never, I believe, wants all that the thing offers and implies. He
wants, at most, no more than certain parts. He may desire, let us
say, a housekeeper to protect his goods and entertain his
friends--but he may shrink from the thought of sharing his bathtub
with anyone, and home cooking may be downright poisonous to
him. He may yearn for a son to pray at his tomb--and yet suffer
acutely at the me reapproach of relatives-in-law. He may dream of
a beautiful and complaisant mistress, less exigent and mercurial than
any a bachelor may hope to discover--and stand aghast at admitting
her to his bank-book, his family-tree and his secret ambitions. He
may want company and not intimacy, or intimacy and not