She will even allow the rabbits to make a polite semblance of being caught, so long as it is perfectly understood that it is all a game and so long as they do not too shamelessly wait for their pursuer. She does not claim so much indulgence for herself, knowing that her husband’s progress is a serious walk rather than an amiable constitutional, and that the distraction caused by having to turn and whistle after a rabbit-hunting companion would be too trying for his temper. It is usually enough for her to let him suspect her virtuously avoided opportunities, with a hint of her successful chases before she caught him. Mr H. G. Wells, in a series of novels after the “New Machiavelli,” tried to make us believe that the triangular drama was as common in England as in other nations, and quite as well suited to our ordinary habits. It was a foolish attempt to ascribe the passions of the few to the temperaments of the many. Wives of Sir Isaac Harman and Passionate Friends are no more characteristically English than Don Quixote, except in an extremely attenuated sense. There are people in London, also conspicuous at the Russian ballet, who find a diversion in a display of promiscuity, though they are a small and despicable section of the community: but the seeker after a maximum of loves and lovers is not the typical Englishman or woman, just as Mr Walter Sickert’s back bedrooms and lumbar nudities are not typical English scenery. No doubt, as a nation, we are sexually unimaginative, which leads us into a false puritanism, makes our marriage laws grossly unfair, hinders enlightened attempts to amend them, and complacently allows the worst of all diseases to do its fell work upon the population. But eroticism, we may be thankful, is alien to us, particularly as any attempt to translate eroticism into adequate or possible social terms is bound to be, as Mr Wells shows, a dismal failure. The English woman and the English man, like all others of the species, are liable to be misled by their physical desires, but their good sense and their innate domesticity are too strong to countenance any hasty experiments in the relations which they consider sacred and vital. It is good philosophy, surely, to take things as they are, not as you might wish them to be. It is the athletic activity, the courage, the practical energy of the Englishwoman which make her, possibly, ascetic in her imagination and prim even in her abandonments. To a Frenchman it is always problematical whether a given woman is virtuous, to an Englishman her virtue is a natural assumption: the difference indicated in the women of the two nations is obvious. The Englishwoman can answer the reliance of the man with a self-reliance which is one of her most charming qualities; the Frenchwoman can only answer her countrymen’s suspicion by an elaborate avoidance of any appearance of justifying it: and the mind of the latter is occupied with infinite possibilities