present time the husband's authority has been overlaid by new social
conventions from above and undermined by new legal regulations from below.

Yet, it is important to realise, although the husband's domestic throne
has been in appearance elegantly re-covered and in substance has become
worm-eaten, it still stands and still retains its ancient shape and
structure. There has never been a French Revolution in the home, and that
Revolution itself, which modified society so extensively, scarcely
modified the legal supremacy of the husband at all, even in France under
the Code Napoléon and still less anywhere else. Interwoven with all the
new developments, and however less obtrusive it may have become, the old
tradition still continues among us. Since, also, the husband is,
conventionally and in large measure really, the economic support of the
home,--the work of the wife and even actual financial contributions
brought by her not being supposed to affect that convention,--this state
of things is held to be justified.

Thus when a man enters the home as a husband, to seat himself on the
antique domestic throne and to play the part assigned to him of old, he is
involuntarily, even unconsciously, following an ancient tradition and
taking his place in a procession of husbands which began long ages before
he was born. It thus comes about that a man, even after he is married, and
a husband are two different persons, so that his wife who mainly knows him
as a husband may be unable to form any just idea of what he is like as a
man. As a husband he has stepped out of the path that belongs to him in
the world, and taken on another part which has called out altogether
different reactions, so he is sometimes a much more admirable person in
one of these spheres--whichever it may be--than in the other.

We must not be surprised if the husband's position has sometimes developed