property owners, i.e.,in which the property-owning caste
reaches down into the lowest conceivable strata of bounders and
ignoramuses. The low-caste man is never quite sure of his wife
unless he is convinced that she is entirely devoid of amorous
susceptibility. Thus he grows uneasy whenever she shows any sign
of responding in kind to his own elephantine emotions, and is apt to
be suspicious of even so trivial a thing as a hearty response to a
connubial kiss. If he could manage to rid himself of such suspicions,
there would be less public gabble about anesthetic wives, and fewer
books written by quacks with sure cures for them, and a good deal
less cold-mutton formalism and boredom at the domestic hearth.


I have a feeling that the husband of this sort--he is very common in
the United States, and almost as common among the middle classes
of England, Germany and Scandinavia--does himself a serious
disservice, and that he is uneasily conscious of it. Having got
himself a wife to his austere taste, he finds that she is rather
depressing--that his vanity is almost as painfully damaged by her
emotional inertness as it would have been by a too provocative and
hedonistic spirit. For the thing that chiefly delights a man, when
some, woman has gone through the solemn buffoonery of yielding
to his great love, is the sharp and flattering contrast between her
reserve in the presence of other men and her enchanting
complaisance in the presence of himself. Here his vanity is
enormously tickled. To the world in general she seems remote and
unapproachable; to him she is docile, fluttering, gurgling, even a bit
abandoned. It is as if some great magnifico male, some inordinate
czar or kaiser, should step down from the throne to play dominoes
with him behind the door. The greater the contrast between the