not been, indeed, for the fact that he was already married, and to a
very sensible wife, he would have run off with this flapper, and so
made himself publicly ridiculous.


Another reason for the relatively late marriages of superior men is
found, perhaps, in the fact that, as a man grows older, the
disabilities he suffers by marriage tend to diminish and the
advantages to increase. At thirty aman is terrified by the inhibitions
of monogamy and has little taste for the so-called comforts of a
home; at sixty he is beyond amorous adventure and is in need
of creature ease and security. What he is oftenest conscious of, in
these later years, is his physical decay; he sees himself as in
imminent danger of falling into neglect and helplessness. He is thus
confronted by a choice between getting a wife or hiring a nurse, and
he commonly chooses the wife as the less expensive and exacting.
The nurse, indeed, would probably try to marry him anyhow; if he
employs her in place of a wife he commonly ends by finding himself
married and minus a nurse, to his confusion and discomfiture, and
to the far greater discomfiture of his heirs and assigns. This process
is so obvious and so commonplace that I apologize formally for
rehearsing it. What it indicates is simply this: that aman's instinctive
aversion to marriage is grounded upon a sense of social and
economic self-sufficiency, and that it descends into a mere theory
when this self-sufficiency disappears. After all, nature is on the side
of mating, and hence on the side of marriage, and vanity is a
powerful ally of nature. If men, at the normal mating age, had half
as much to gain by marriage as women gain, then, all men
would be as ardently in favour of it as women are.