Local bill-board advertisements of moving pictures have recently shown a ball-room in which an irate gentleman in evening-dress grasped the shoulder of another gentleman who looked crushed and crest-fallen. With an inimitable gesture of moral indignation the first gentleman pointed to a quivering female on the other side of the room. The caption of this stirring lithograph was “His Forgotten Wife.” The exquisite absurdity of this picture is clear. It is significant of the way in which we are all brow-beaten by the sodden nonsense of the tribe that it took me some minutes of reflection to come upon the unreason of the thing. If the crushed looking gentleman had forgotten the lady, she was not, of course, his wife and could never have truly been. If we are dealing with a euphemism and are to understand that he wanted to forget her, she may once have been his wife, but had, quite obviously, ceased to be. In this moving picture there is illustrated what I call the insane view of monogamic marriage, namely, that it is put on like a shirt or a coat and must be kept on however ill-fitting, comfortless, unclean, or dangerous, and that in this mere keeping on there is virtue. There is the further implication that marriage has nothing to do with good behavior, which is rewarded even in penitentiaries, or with ill; that it is, indeed, an abstract kind of fate, a magical or infernal machine, a metaphysical trap. Once you are caught in it, you must stay caught. To wriggle is sin. Do I seem to be discussing the matter on too low a plane? I wish I were. The truth is that cultivated and liberal people have not yet freed their minds from the concepts with which that amusing picture deals. It is in action, not in fireside talk that these things are tested. And it is true that even such people will pay an uninhibited respect to a depraved character, cruel, treacherous, stupid, who practices that moving-picture theory of marriage which, in ways no less real for being subtle and but half-conscious, they will be tempted to withhold from a person of the utmost spiritual grace and charm who practices that kind of marriage of which, theoretically and outspokenly, they so eloquently approve.