immunities that she has under existing laws. There are, for example,
even in America, women who practise the domestic arts with competence
and diligence, despite the plain fact that no legal penalty would be
visited upon them if they failed to do so. There are women who follow
external trades and professions, contributing a share to the family
exchequer. There are women who obey their husbands, even against
their best judgments. There are, most numerous of all, women who wink
discreetly at husbandly departures, overt or in mere intent, from the
oath of chemical purity taken at the altar. It is a commonplace, indeed,
that many happy marriages admit a party of the third part. There would
be more of them if there were more women with enough serenity of mind
to see the practical advantage of the arrangement. The trouble with such
triangulations is not primarily that they involve perjury or that
they offer any fundamental offence to the wife; if she avoids banal
theatricals, in fact, they commonly have the effect of augmenting the
husband's devotion to her and respect for her, if only as the fruit of
comparison. The trouble with them is that very few men among us have
sense enough to manage them intelligently. The masculine mind is readily
taken in by specious values; the average married man of Protestant
Christendom, if he succumbs at all, succumbs to some meretricious and
flamboyant creature, bent only upon fleecing him. Here is where
the harsh realism of the Frenchman shows its superiority to the
sentimentality of the men of the Teutonic races. A Frenchman would no
more think of taking a mistress without consulting his wife than he
would think of standing for office without consulting his wife. The
result is that he is seldom victimized. For one Frenchman ruined by
women there are at least a hundred Englishmen and Americans, despite
the fact that a hundred times as many Frenchmen engage in that sort of
recreation. The case of Zola is typical. As is well known, his amours
were carefully supervised by Mme. Zola from the first days of their
marriage, and inconsequence his life was wholly free from scandals and
his mind was never distracted from his work.

46. The Eternal Romance

But whatever the future of monogamous marriage, there will never be any
decay of that agreeable adventurousness which now lies at the bottom
of all transactions between the sexes. Women may emancipate themselves,
they may borrow the whole