In Ellen Key’s “Love and Marriage” occurs a passage explaining that while monogamy is probably the best marital arrangement for the majority of people, there are some individuals so constituted that monogamy is unsatisfactory to them; they find that the fulfillment of their nature requires that they should have more than one love at one time. When my former wife came upon that passage, she brought it to me in triumph. Here was the thesis upon which she had been arguing for many years, and here was a woman, recognized as a great teacher, who believed as she did. I do no unkindness to my former wife in making this statement, because she was accustomed to quote the passage to every one she met, and she defended it in published writings. Now, I have a respect for Ellen Key’s personality, and for many of her ideas. I admit that she may know more about the nature of woman than I do, and may be correct in her statements as to the love-needs and the love-rights of some women. All I could say was that I found the idea offensive, and I would part company with anyone who acted upon it. What men and women might agree to do in some far-off blissful future I did not attempt to say, but for the present we lived in a world in which venereal disease was an unforgettable menace, and on this account if no other, one had the right to demand marital fidelity. I argued this question through long years, and my former wife found my arguments tiresome and oppressive. To the newspapers she described me as “an essential monogamist,” a phrase which gave great glee to the “Tenderloin” loungers and the newspaper wits who serve them. Just how these wits reconciled the phrase with the charge that I was a “free-lover,” I can not explain, nor have the wits explained it. Now ordinarily, when Americans find that they are hopelessly disagreed upon such a question, they proceed to establish a residence in Reno or Texas. Etiquette requires that the man should pay all the expenses, and also that he should bear the odium involved. In one of Bernard Shaw’s plays he explains that the English law requires not merely infidelity, but cruelty in the presence of witnesses, and therefore the convention has come to be that the man and woman shall repair to the garden, and there in the presence of the gardener the husband shall knock his wife into a flower-bed. I remember some years ago Mr. Booth Tarkington stepped off a steamer from Europe and was informed by reporters that his wife was suing him for divorce, alleging cruelty; he was asked for a comment, and replied, graciously: “When one’s wife accuses one of cruelty, no gentleman would think of making a reply.”