I must say that these young men who do not think, but merely feel and act, scarcely seem of the highest type in my opinion, and if mating like the birds were to be generally accepted as a sign of a noble nature--well, nobility would be decidedly less rare than at present! IV WILD OATS FOR WIVES ‘Nothing that is worth saying is proper.’ --G. BERNARD SHAW. ‘I don’t believe in the existence of Puritan women. I don’t think there is a woman in the world who would not be a little flattered if one made love to her. It is that which makes woman so irresistibly adorable.’ --OSCAR WILDE. If there be any readers whose susceptibilities are shocked by this headline, they are respectfully requested--nay, commanded--to read no further. If there be any whose susceptibilities waver without as yet experiencing any actual shock, they are affectionately asked--nay, implored--to re-read several times the above quotation from Mr Shaw’s immortal _Candida_, to thereupon pull themselves together and take the plunge. I can promise them it won’t be anything like as terrible as they half hope--in fact its essential propriety will probably disappoint them bitterly! Curiously enough, though women are more anxious to marry than men, and do everything in their power to achieve what men often strive to resist--after marriage it is generally the woman who is most discontented. Of late years a spirit of strange unrest has come over married women, and they frequently rebel against conditions which our grandmothers would never have dreamed of murmuring at. There are a variety of causes for this: one that marriage falls short of women’s expectations, as I said in the opening chapter, another that they have had no _feminine_ wild oats. Please note the qualifying adjective, duly italicised, and do not attempt to misunderstand me. I am no advocate of the licence generally accorded to men being extended to women. ‘Wild oats’ of this nature, otherwise an ante-hymeneal ‘fling,’ was certainly not a necessity of our grandmothers, but a certain (fairly numerous) type of modern women seem to make better wives when they have reaped this harvest. Take for example the cases of Yvonne and Yvette which are personally known to me. Yvette was engaged at eighteen and married at twenty-one. At the age of twenty-six she was the mother of four children. She had scarcely time to realise what youth meant and begin to enjoy it before her girlhood was stifled under the responsibilities of marriage and maternity. She had accepted her first offer, and he was practically the only man she knew anything of. Beyond him she had seen nothing of men, or of the world; certainly she had never flirted or had men friends or enjoyed any admiration but that of her _fiancé_.