It is owing to the secondary, tertiary, or, at any rate, minor position of importance that her husband occupies in the life of a woman who is bearing him children at regular intervals, that his individual characteristics do not really require to be very striking in order to prove satisfactory to her. It is for this reason that he must be a brute indeed, or a drunken sot, or a maniac, if he is to provoke her active hatred while child-bearing continues. Finding, as she does, her principal pleasure in the experiences of motherhood—provided that he behaves with average decency and earns a comfortable living—she asks but little more.[71] Short of impossible conduct on his part, therefore, it may be taken for granted that it never occurs to the positive healthy married woman, who bears children at regular intervals, to make any effort to seek another love affair, and even if the opportunity for such a love affair should come her way, and be set before her with all the persuasiveness that deep desire in the other party can lend it, she will, as a rule, resist it and let it pass by without very much of a struggle. She is finding the consummation of her being in the life she is leading, and let her husband be ever so besotted, ignorant, boring and uncompanionable, it will never occur to her to go in search of another love. This conclusion is, I think, borne out by the statistics of divorce in England and Wales, where separations between people who do not attempt to limit the family, is extremely rare. It is usually said with reference to such cases that it is the children who “strengthen the union.” This is the popular and even the learned opinion.[72] The prevalence of this opinion, and the high authority behind it, however, should not lead us to misunderstand the true nature of the actual forces at work. It is to some extent true that the presence of children does induce parents, who might be tempted to separate, to think twice about it. The father pauses before he decides to deprive his offspring of their mother, and _vice versâ_. But these wholly impersonal considerations binding a couple together are as nothing compared with the vital forces that are actually at work. The impersonal considerations may weigh, but only if supported by the far more potent promptings of healthy and normal conditions. Nor should it be concluded too hastily from the low figures of divorce among people who have large families, that the presence of children operates in causing the parents to feel a deeper “love” for each other. It is possible for a fruitful couple to be almost entirely indifferent to each other, as many thousands are, and yet to remain together, partly because of the impersonal considerations already referred to, partly from pure conservatism, and also from fear of publicity, or scandal, or a feeling of shyness, or a certain cynicism which leads them to prefer the devil they know before the devil they know not.