The negative man of this class is of the cold Don Juan type, who gratifies his vanity more than his sexual appetite by repeated conquests. He too soon tires of his wife and of his home. He does this all the more readily, seeing that his marriage itself has usually been quite an unintended consummation on his part of one of the many flirtations his vanity led him into in early manhood, and that he has been chafing ever since it was finally settled at the thought of the many conquests he might have made before taking the final step. His nostrils, too, yearn for the hot breath of adulation. He is a tormentor of positive women, because he can so readily hold himself aloof at the last station before the terminus. If this man becomes unfaithful, it will be because his enormous vanity has overcome his caution. In order to extract the last and most enthralling confession from a young woman’s heart—which will cause him to reach his highest pinnacle of exaltation—one day he will go too far, either in his protestations or in his caresses,[98] and then, if he is dealing with the kind of girl or woman who knows of no facile retreat from such avowals, and who is really in earnest, he will find himself impelled in a direction and to an end which he can truthfully swear he never had in contemplation at the outset. The fact that the law of England deals too lightly with this kind of dandified scoundrel (for such men almost always dress well) is due not merely to the fact that, generally speaking, it is grotesquely lenient to correspondents as a class, but also to its inability to distinguish between the adultery of the negative man and woman, whose misdemeanour is the outcome of vanity alone, and whose ruin of another’s home is, therefore, wanton and unnecessary, and the adultery which is the outcome of genuine passion, and which, therefore, partakes far more of that quality of human action which is elemental and inevitable. This man only becomes tragic under a snub. He finds no infinite resource in a deep knowledge of his own value, and is, therefore, incapable of self-consolation when shown the cold-shoulder. Hence the woman who does not fall in with his scheme of mutual worship, incurs his homicidal loathing. She destroys his _joie de vivre_, his very _primum mobile_, the source of his will to live. His career is a series of escapes from female fires he has deliberately kindled; but he is always more ready to forgive a burn than the fuel that refuses to flare up under the power of his bellows. Before concluding section (_c_) perhaps it would be advisable and also helpful to give a brief analysis of the psychological forces which impel the negative, vain man and woman along their career of vanity-gratification at all costs. For, while to understand them will be in a measure to exonerate them, it will also serve as a means of recognizing their type when we see it.