is own wife in a divorce scandal, against his
conscience, against his instinct, and to the destruction of his home,
solely because Society conspired to drive him to keep its own lower
morality in countenance in this miserable and undignified manner.

Morality is confused in such matters. In an elegant plutocracy, a
jealous husband is regarded as a boor. Among the tradesmen who supply
that plutocracy with its meals, a husband who is not jealous, and
refrains from assailing his rival with his fists, is regarded as a
ridiculous, contemptible and cowardly cuckold. And the laboring class
is divided into the respectable section which takes the tradesman's
view, and the disreputable section which enjoys the license of the
plutocracy without its money: creeping below the law as its exemplars
prance above it; cutting down all expenses of respectability and even
decency; and frankly accepting squalor and disrepute as the price of
anarchic self-indulgence. The conflict between Malvolio and Sir Toby,
between the marquis and the bourgeois, the cavalier and the puritan,
the ascetic and the voluptuary, goes on continually, and goes on not
only between class and class and individual and individual, but in the
selfsame breast in a series of reactions and revulsions in which the
irresistible becomes the unbearable, and the unbearable the
irresistible, until none of us can say what our characters really are
in this respect.

THE MISSING DATA OF A SCIENTIFIC NATURAL HISTORY OF MARRIAGE.

Of one thing I am persuaded: we shall never attain to a reasonable
healthy public opinion on sex questions until we offer, as the data for
that opinion, our actual conduct and our real thoughts instead of a
moral fiction which we agree to call virtuous conduct, and which we
then--and here comes in the mischief--pretend is our conduct and our
thoughts. If the result were that we all believed one another to be
better than we really are, there would be something to be said for it;
but the actual result appears to be a monstrous exaggeration of the
power and continuity of sexual passion. The whole world shares the fate
of Lucrezia Borgia, who, though she seems on investigation to have been
quite a suitable wife for a modern British Bishop, has been invested by
the popular historical imagination with all the extravagances of a
Messalina or a Cenci. Writers of belles lettres who are rash enough to
admit that their whole life is not one constant preoccupation