affinities, soul mates, love at first sight, and such phantasms. She is
quite ready to fall in love, as the phrase is, with any man who is
plainly eligible, and she usually knows a good many more such men
than one. Her primary demand in marriage is not for the agonies of
romance, but for comfort and security; she is thus easier satisfied
than a man, and oftener happy. One frequently hears of
remarried widowers who continue to moon about their dead first
wives, but for a remarried widow to show any such sentimentality
would be a nine days' wonder. Once replaced, a dead husband is
expunged from the minutes. And so is a dead love.


One of the results of all this is a subtle reinforcement of the
contempt with which women normally regard their husbands--a
contempt grounded, as I have shown, upon a sense of intellectual
superiority. To this primary sense of superiority is now added the
disparagement of a concrete comparison, and over all is an
ineradicable resentment of the fact that such a comparison has been
necessary. In other words, the typical husband is a second-rater,
and no one is better aware of it than his wife. He is, taking
averages, one who has been loved, as the saying goes, by but one
woman, and then only as a second, third or nth choice. If any other
woman had ever loved him, as the idiom has it, she would have
married him, and so made him ineligible for his present happiness.
But the average bachelor is a man who has been loved, so to speak,
by many women, and is the lost first choice of at least some of
them. Here presents the unattainable, and hence the admirable; the
husband is the attained and disdained.