and many a man has shot or stabbed a friend or been shot or
stabbed by him in a duel, or disgraced himself and ruined his own
wife in a divorce scandal, against his conscience, against his
instinct, and to the destruction of his home, solely because
Society conspired to drive him to keep its own lower morality in
countenance in this miserable and undignified manner.

Morality is confused in such matters. In an elegant plutocracy, a
jealous husband is regarded as a boor. Among the tradesmen who
supply that plutocracy with its meals, a husband who is not
jealous, and refrains from assailing his rival with his fists, is
regarded as a ridiculous, contemptible and cowardly cuckold. And
the laboring class is divided into the respectable section which
takes the tradesman's view, and the disreputable section which
enjoys the license of the plutocracy without its money: creeping
below the law as its exemplars prance above it; cutting down all
expenses of respectability and even decency; and frankly
accepting squalor and disrepute as the price of anarchic self-
indulgence. The conflict between Malvolio and Sir Toby, between
the marquis and the bourgeois, the cavalier and the puritan, the
ascetic and the voluptuary, goes on continually, and goes on not
only between class and class and individual and individual, but
in the selfsame breast in a series of reactions and revulsions in
which the irresistible becomes the unbearable, and the unbearable
the irresistible, until none of us can say what our characters
really are in this respect.


THE MISSING DATA OF A SCIENTIFIC NATURAL HISTORY OF MARRIAGE.