o slight as to
be practically almost negligible. Thus the average woman is under none
of the common masculine illusions about elective affinities, soul mates,
love at first sight, and such phantasms. She is quite ready to fall in
love, as the phrase is, with any man who is plainly eligible, and she
usually knows a good many more such men than one. Her primary demand
in marriage is not for the agonies of romance, but for comfort and
security; she is thus easier satisfied than a man, and oftener happy.
One frequently hears of remarried widowers who continue to moon about
their dead first wives, but for a remarried widow to show any such
sentimentality would be a nine days' wonder. Once replaced, a dead
husband is expunged from the minutes. And so is a dead love.

One of the results of all this is a subtle reinforcement of the contempt
with which women normally regard their husbands--a contempt grounded, as
I have shown, upon a sense of intellectual superiority. To this primary
sense of superiority is now added the disparagement of a concrete
comparison, and over all is an ineradicable resentment of the fact
that such a comparison has been necessary. In other words, the typical
husband is a second-rater, and no one is better aware of it than his
wife. He is, taking averages, one who has been loved, as the saying
goes, by but one woman, and then only as a second, third or nth choice.
If any other woman had ever loved him, as the idiom has it, she would
have married him, and so made him ineligible for his present happiness.
But the average bachelor is a man who has been loved, so to speak, by
many women, and is the lost first choice of at least some of them. Here
presents the unattainable, and hence the admirable; the husband is the
attained and disdained.

Here we have a sufficient explanation of the general superiority of
bachelors, so often noted by students of mankind--a superiority so
marked that it is difficult, in all history, to find six first-rate
philosophers who were married men. The bachelor's very capacity to
avoid marriage is no more than a proof of his relative freedom from
the ordinary sentimentalism of his sex--in other words, of his greater
approximation to the clear headedness of the enemy sex. He is able to
defeat the enterprise of women because he brings to the business an
equipment almost comparable to their own. Herbert Spencer, until he was
fifty, was ferociously harassed by women of all sorts. A