At thirty aman is terrified by the inhibitions of monogamy and has
little taste for the so-called comforts of a home; at sixty he is beyond
amorous adventure and is in need of creature ease and security. What he
is oftenest conscious of, in these later years, is his physical decay;
he sees himself as in imminent danger of falling into neglect and
helplessness. He is thus confronted by a choice between getting a
wife or hiring a nurse, and he commonly chooses the wife as the less
expensive and exacting. The nurse, indeed, would probably try to marry
him anyhow; if he employs her in place of a wife he commonly ends
by finding himself married and minus a nurse, to his confusion and
discomfiture, and to the far greater discomfiture of his heirs and
assigns. This process is so obvious and so commonplace that I apologize
formally for rehearsing it. What it indicates is simply this: that
aman's instinctive aversion to marriage is grounded upon a sense of
social and economic self-sufficiency, and that it descends into a mere
theory when this self-sufficiency disappears. After all, nature is on
the side of mating, and hence on the side of marriage, and vanity is a
powerful ally of nature. If men, at the normal mating age, had half
as much to gain by marriage as women gain, then, all men would be as
ardently in favour of it as women are.

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 nul