fonder. Perhaps
not actually fonder, but at any rate more tolerant, more curious, more
eager. Two difficulties, however, stand in the way of the widespread
adoption of the remedy. One lies in its costliness: the average couple
cannot afford a double establishment, even temporarily. The other lies
in the fact that it inevitably arouses the envy and ill-nature of those
who cannot adopt it, and so causes a gabbling of scandal. The world
invariably suspects the worst. Let man and wife separate to save their
happiness from suffocation in the kitchen, the dining room and the
connubial chamber, and it will immediately conclude that the corpse is
already laid out in the drawing-room.

28. Woman as Wife

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
inefficiency