ishwomen are very troublesome; they are either so light that they
do not understand you when you tell them you love them, or so deep that
you must elope every time. This is a difficult country." I do not want
to seem cynical, but the polygamous nature of man is so ill-recognized
and the boredom of woman such a national institution that when it is too
late to pretend that that which has happened has not happened, most of
the mischief has already been done. Why a husband or wife who has found
attraction in another should immediately treat his partner abominably is
not easily understood, for falling in love with the present victim need
not make him rude or remiss to the rest of the world. But the British
are a strange and savage people. Also, when in doubt they get drunk, so
I fear I must leave a clearer recognition of polygamous instincts to the
slow-growing enlightenment of the mind of man.

He is growing enlightened; at least he is infinitely more educated than
he was, for he has begun to recognize that woman is to a certain extent
a human being, a savage, a barbarian, but entitled to the consideration
generally given to the Hottentot. I do not think woman will always be
savage, though I hope she will not turn into the clear-eyed,
weather-beaten mate that Mr. H. G. Wells likes to think of--for the
future. She has come to look upon man as an equation that can be solved.
He, too, in a sense, and both are to-day much less inclined than they
were fifty years ago to overlook a chance of pleasing. It is certain
that men and women to-day dress more deliberately for each other than
they ever did before, that they lead each other, sometimes with dutiful
unwillingness, to the theatre or the country; it is very painful
sometimes, this organization of pleasure, but it is necessary because
dull lives are bad lives, and better fall into the river than never go
to the river at all. It is dangerous and vain to take up the attitude,
"I alone am enough." Yet many do: as one walks along a suburban street,
where every window is shut, where every dining room has its aspidistra
in a pot, one realizes that scores of people are busily heaping ash upon
the once warm fire of their love. The stranger is the alternative; he
obscures small quarrels; if the stranger is beautiful, he urges to
competition; if he is inferior, he soothes pride. But above all, the
stranger is change, therefore hope. The stranger is an insurance against
loss of personal pr