In _Herr Bengt’s Wife_ he has developed body and temperament. It is the description of a woman’s many phases: discontent, happy love, the child, the quarrel after marriage, coquetting with others, reconciliation--it seems as though it had been written in a paroxysm of love. The description is outwardly full of admiration, inwardly full of psychological analysis. It is the work of a seer who worships, while awake, the woman whose true self he perceives in his sleep and already despises. _Herr Bengt’s Wife_ was acted at the Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm, and Strindberg’s wife played the part of heroine with great success, the only success she ever had on the stage. His next work was a book called _Marriages_, which consists of twelve stories of married life, black with the weft-yarns of life, beginning with pain, ending with death. He describes the tame love of the latter end of the nineteenth century which, fast bound hand and foot, drags her span of existence through economical, pathological and “universal human” gulfs. He describes the young student who engages himself to a fully developed girl of fourteen, who, during the ten years of their engagement, becomes a thin, shrivelled, nervous being, he marries without loving her and she grows to look more wretched than ever after giving birth to numerous children. He describes how the penniless young man brings the poor girl home, and they do not know how to bring up the children on an insufficient income; the couple are isolated from their social surroundings and forced to live in a back street, where their children play about in the gutter. He describes how the young notary and his wife begin their married life by giving expensive dinners, because it is only possible to be young and newly married once in a lifetime. And when the child comes, the bailiff comes too, and all the fine furniture finds its way into the creditors’ pockets, and the old father-in-law, the Major, who had foreseen what would happen, takes charge of his daughter and grandchild, while the young husband is left to become a celibate. He describes a man who both in character and temperament is predestined to be constant in love and marriage, but his wife, though of good family, is dissolute and wicked. He has to pay for her riding lessons and to entertain her lovers, look after her children and conceal her drunkenness--he is chained to her, he cannot free himself, he is monogamous in spite of his better judgment.