Folklore, especially in its grosser forms, but also classical and medieval,[198] and even modern literature--medical, psychiatric, and most of all the writings of psychoanalysis--abound in descriptions of the tragic results that ensue when husband and wife do not grow old together or when their age disparity is too great. Even in the purest, most loyal, and best mated pairs there is often a period of unspoken and perhaps half unconscious suspicion and jealousy, which each partner regrets and tries to banish from waking thoughts, outcrops of which often appear in dreams. Roués have always felt that the young wives of old men were their legitimate prey. The former seem more liable to fall before temptation than if they had remained single. Bitter, indeed, is often the lot of Senex who dotes on a young bride and seeks to atone by lavishing gifts and providing every kind of service and social enjoyment that infatuation can suggest for waning marital potency. While society austerely and even ostentatiously condemns such a wife who errs, it secretly judges her to be not without some excuse and has little pity, and often only covert derision, for such a husband. Yet more pathetic is the converse case of the aging wife of a spouse yet young and lusty. The sense that she is losing her charm for the man she loves is gall and wormwood to her very soul. She, too, seeks to atone by making herself physically more attractive, not only to him but to others that he may see their admiration, by every kind of personal ministration and often by seeking literary, artistic, or other success outside the family circle. She becomes painfully conscious of the attractions of younger or otherwise more favored women whom her mate meets and easily grows suspicious, not only with but often without cause. She may feel the lure of incentives other women use to attract men which her pride will not permit her to cultivate, although she may make concessions to these more or less unconsciously. Tendencies thus repressed may find outcrops in other fields and may even take the form of symptoms, perhaps of fears for the well-being of her mate, even of physical harm, business failure, social disgrace, or perhaps religious heresy. In other cases she may be at last forced to admit infidelity on his part and then it is that she finds herself face to face with the dour problem of either trying to ignore or condone, and perhaps conceal or excuse, his fault to others and living a hollow life of sham and convention on the one hand; or of openly breaking and separating and living henceforth a more or less isolated life, on the other. She must thus very carefully weigh not only her own material interests but the future of her children and the chance of pitiless public scandal.