The couples belonging to this type can also endure childlessness or a cessation of child-birth with almost perfect equanimity; the man being very much more concerned about the figure he is cutting as a chivalrous, sporting mate, who observes the rules of “cricket” with his spouse, than about any other aspect of their married life. He studies with asinine perplexity the so-called inscrutable complexities of his wife’s mind, and is always making “allowances” and preaching the doctrine of give and take. His great charm, according to modern values, is the fact that he regards women as utterly incomprehensible. Women are so powerful nowadays in determining opinion, and have so often and so emphatically called the men who show some insight into women’s nature “prigs,” that at the present day both women and men unanimously call any man who voices penetrating views about _woman_, an out-and-out prig. In fact, in order to be a prig it is necessary to have shown some ability in analysing the true nature of woman.[97] The women in such unions very frequently outstrip their male companions in mental nimbleness, and this disturbance of the proper balance frequently leads them, in their vague discontent, to become prominent exponents and defenders of all those claims of sex-equality and sex-levelling, which have agitated the home life of northern European countries (where most negative people are to be found) for the last hundred years. The spectacle of their lady-like and unobtrusive male, there can be no doubt, is usually the first incentive towards these kinds of activities, and, seeing that they have the constant substantiation of their claims in the tame animal with whom they cohabit, it is not surprising that they frequently enter into “Woman’s Cause” with a conviction and a fervour very much more intense than the more academic enthusiasm of the old maid who is usually their associate in the movement. Indeed, it not infrequently happens that the “male” of these militant women is himself an active collaborator in his wife’s public work, and so complete is their intellectual and sentimental agreement on the question, that he will echo her words with the docility of a parrot. The type (_c_) is also common enough and is growing more plentiful in all classes of society. It is the negative type which approximates most to the passionate, tragic type of real life and fiction; because, while it possesses no deep passions, its extreme vanity makes it capable of the wildest excesses. In all the possible situations of married life, this type never consults any other arbiter than vanity, and it is only when its caution, cowardice or indolence can overpower its vanity that the latter does not decide the issue.