the father of her children, and as a person who, since he is destined to be her constant companion, it is merely ordinary good sense to humour and to please; but provided that she have children from him at regular intervals, she is not much troubled by the pronounced drop in her affection and regard for him. To the man, on the other hand, to whom, as we have seen, the sparking-plug incident constitutes a complete sexual experience, and whose sexual life therefore begins and ends with this spasmodic desire for woman and the brief relation with her to which it leads, this falling off in affection and desire is a matter of very grave concern, _because he has no bodily consolation_. He may love his children, he may delight in their company, and he may be wholly interested in his home; but the bearing and nursing of his children constitutes no bodily experience to him; and in life it is the demands of the body that are most important and most importunate when they are not obeyed. For his body to enjoy its necessary, satisfactory experience, slight and brief as it is, it is essential that some desire, some passion, in fact some of the feeling he felt for his wife as a fiancée, should remain. It is necessary that he should still look upon the act as one of passion, desire and power. But as we have seen, the act has been deprived of most of its passion, desire and power by the inevitable consequences of the State monogamic marriage. Its beauties have literally been worn away. It has lost its savour and its strength by having been systematized, time-tabled, protected, ordered, and above all, repeated too often, without that “certain modicum of variety” which is the essential element in all life. Generally speaking, then, it may be argued with justice that, where conditions are normal and children are born regularly, monogamic marriage can be tolerated quite well by women, but not by men. For when once the elements constituting the joy of cohabitation have been robbed from the man’s share—as in nine hundred and ninety-nine marriages out of a thousand they must—the relationship, though still endurable to the positive healthy female, to whom the act of fertilization, and _raison de plus_ her husband, is of such minor importance, becomes intolerable to the healthy positive male; and unless he is prepared to face a life in which every week is a long-drawn-out torture to his body, he cannot remain faithful to his spouse. In its general attitude towards and understanding of monogamic marriage, therefore, this Age, in addition to smuggling the lie of happiness into the contract, also completely distorts the true relation to the union of the woman on the one hand, and the man on the other. By a false and entirely gratuitous analogy, it supposes that the man’s position can be and is as tolerable as that of the child-bearing female.