This list, however, can scarcely be considered representative, as it contained only two actors, three soldiers, one sailor, and no stockbrokers--four classes in which inconstant husbands are particularly numerous. The conditions of an actor’s life obviously tend towards infidelity; the unhealthy excitement and alternating depression of a stockbroker’s existence may have the same effect. Members of the services are popularly supposed to be less faithful than the rest of husbands, but possibly if the business and professional men had the same amount of opportunities and temptation, a similar excess of leisure and equally long intervals of separation from their wives, they would prove as inconstant as the country’s defenders are supposed to be. My doctor’s list also contains no members of the ‘Smart Set,’ a class containing practically no faithful husbands, according to Father Vaughan! Although it is the little things that spoil conjugal happiness, it is the big things which separate husband and wife, and of these undoubtedly infidelity is the most frequent cause. It might truly be called the crux of marriage. Personally I think only three faults are bad enough to make it socially worth while for a woman to leave her husband: drunkenness with violence; misconduct with members of the household, temporary or permanent; and introducing a mistress under a wife’s roof. In the case of a woman with children, even these are not enough if she cannot take the children with her. For the last-named act alone a wife could obtain a divorce under the code of Justinian. Lapses from the marriage vow on the part of one’s spouse are best treated, like all other troubles, in a philosophical spirit. It is, however, ‘easy to talk!’--one often hears that sexual jealousy is the most frightful of mental tortures: Men are more keenly affected by it than women, and the man whose wife has been unfaithful seems to suffer more acutely, even when he does not care for her, than the woman in the reverse circumstances. That is because his passions are stronger, a man will tell you, or because he looks up to the mother of his children as a being above the sins of the flesh. Probably the real reason is that man has generally had his own way since the _ménage_ in Eden, and he resents having his belongings taken from him. Woman, however, can bear this deprivation better, being more accustomed to share her lord from the time when her sex began to multiply in excess of his--or is it that women have no instinctive antagonism to polygamy? The world has become well accustomed to man’s polygamous instinct by now, and even its laws are framed accordingly. In novels, the discovery of a husband’s infidelity always causes a perfect cataclysm; the reader is treated to page after page of frenzied scenes; the wife almost loses her reason; her friends and relatives sit in gloomy council deciding ‘what is to be done’; the news is shouted from the housetops; and everybody cuts the man dead.