26.


Disparate Unions


This brings us to a fact frequently noted by students of the subject:
that first-rate men, when they marry at all, tend to marry noticeably
inferior wives. The causes of the phenomenon, so often discussed
and so seldom illuminated, should be plain by now. The first-rate
man, by postponing marriage as long as possible, often approaches
it in the end with his faculties crippled by senility, and is thus open
to the advances of women whose attractions are wholly
meretricious, e.g., empty flappers, scheming widows, and trained
nurses with a highly developed professional technic of sympathy. If
he marries at all, indeed, he must commonly marry badly, for
women of genuine merit are no longer interested in him; what was
once a lodestar is now no more than a smoking smudge. It is this
circumstance that account for the low calibre of a good many
first-rate men's sons, and gives a certain support to the common
notion that they are always third-raters. Those sons inherit
from their mothers as well as from their fathers, and the bad strain is
often sufficient to obscure and nullify the good strain. Mediocrity,
as every Mendelian knows, is a dominant character, and
extraordinary ability is recessive character. In a marriage between
an able man and a commonplace woman, the chances that any given
child will resemble the mother are, roughly speaking, three to one.