This boredom of marriage, however, is not nearly so dangerous a
menace to the institution as Mrs. Cox, with evangelistic enthusiasm,
permits herself to think it is. It bears most harshly upon the wife,
who is almost always the more intelligent of the pair; in the case of
the husband its pains are usually lightened by that sentimentality
with which men dilute the disagreeable, particularly in marriage.
Moreover, the average male gets his living by such depressing
devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him. A man
who spends six or eight hours a day acting as teller in a bank, or
sitting upon the bench of a court, or looking to the inexpressibly
trivial details of some process of manufacturing, or writing imbecile
articles for a newspaper, or managing a tramway, or administering
ineffective medicines to stupid and uninteresting patients--a man so
engaged during all his hours of labour, which means a normal,
typical man, is surely not one to be oppressed unduly by the dull
round of domesticity. His wife may bore him hopelessly as
mistress, just as any other mistress inevitably bores a man
(though surely not so quickly and so painfully as a lover bores
a woman), but she is not apt to bore him so badly in her other
capacities. What he commonly complains about in her, in truth, is
not that she tires him by her monotony, but that she tires him by her
variety--not that she is too static, but that she is too dynamic. He is
weary when he gets home, and asks only the dull peace of a hog in a
comfortable sty. This peace is broken by the greater restlessness of
his wife, the fruit of her greater intellectual resilience and curiosity.


Of far more potency as a cause of connubial discord is the general