can be coaxed into paying bills. In the working class especially there
is bitterness among the women, who before their marriage knew the taste
of independence and of earned money in their purses. It is a great love
that can compensate a woman for the loss of freedom after she has
enjoyed it.

Nothing indeed can compensate a woman for this, except a lover, that is
to say, a return to an older state. That is to what she turns, for
strange as it may seem, marriage does not vaccinate against the
temptations of love. She does not easily love again, for she has been
married, and while it is easy to love again when one has been
atrociously betrayed, just because one invests the new with everything
that the old held back, it is difficult to love again when the promised
love turned merely to dullness. There is nothing to strike against.
There is no contrast, and so women slip into relationships that are
silly, because there is nothing real behind them. Boredom is the root of
all evil, and I doubt whether busy and happy women seek adventure, for
few of them want it for adventure's sake: they seek only satisfaction.
That is what most men cruelly misunderstand; they blame woman instead of
searching out their own remissness. Sins of omission matter more than
sins of commission, more even than infidelities, for love, which is all
a woman's life, is only a momentous incident in that of a man. Love may
be the discovery of a happiness, but man remains conscious of many other
delights. Woman is seldom like that. You will imagine a man and a woman
who have blundered upon mutual understanding standing upon the hill from
which Moses saw Canaan. The woman would fill her eyes with Canaan, and
could see nought else, while the man gazing at the promised land would
still be conscious of other countries. In the heart of a man who is
worth anything at all, love must have rivals,--art, science,
ambition,--and it is a delight to woman that there should be rivals to
overcome, even though it be a poor slave she tie to her chariot wheels.

Marriage does not always suffer when people drift away from their
allegiance; in countries such as France notably, where many husbands and
wives do not think it necessary to trust, or tactful to watch each
other, the problem does not set itself so sharply. It is mainly in
Anglo-Saxon countries where the little blue flower has its altars that
the trouble begins. A rather fascinating foreigner said to me once:
"Engl