candescent and intriguing divertisements. He is
far more virtuous than they make him out, far less schooled in sin far
less enterprising and ruthless. I do not say, of course, that he is pure
in heart, for the chances are that he isn't; what I do say is that, in
the overwhelming majority of cases, he is pure in act, even in the face
of temptation. And why? For several main reasons, not to go into minor
ones. One is that he lacks the courage. Another is that he lacks the
money. Another is that he is fundamentally moral, and has a conscience.
It takes more sinful initiative than he has in him to plunge into any
affair save the most casual and sordid; it takes more ingenuity and
intrepidity than he has in him to carry it off; it takes more money
than he can conceal from his consort to finance it. A man may force his
actual wife to share the direst poverty, but even the least vampirish
woman of the third part demands to be courted in what, considering his
station in life, is the grand manner, and the expenses of that grand
manner scare off all save a small minority of specialists in deception.
So long, indeed, as a wife knows her husband's in come accurately, she
has a sure means of holding him to his oaths.

Even more effective than the fiscal barrier is the barrier of
poltroonery. The one character that distinguishes man from the other
higher vertebrate, indeed, is his excessive timorousness, his easy
yielding to alarms, his incapacity for adventure without a crowd behind
him. In his normal incarnation he is no more capable of initiating an
extra-legal affair--at all events, above the mawkish harmlessness of
a flirting match with a cigar girl in a cafe-than he is of scaling the
battlements of hell. He likes to think of himself doing it, just as
he likes to think of himself leading a cavalry charge or climbing the
Matterhorn. Often, indeed, his vanity leads him to imagine the thing
done, and he admits by winks and blushes that he is a bad one. But at
the bottom of all that tawdry pretence there is usually nothing more
material than an oafish smirk at some disgusted shop-girl, or a scraping
of shins under the table. Let any woman who is disquieted by reports
of her husband's derelictions figure to herself how long it would have
taken him to propose to her if left to his own enterprise, and then let
her ask herself if so pusillanimous a creature could be imaged in the
role of Don Giovanni.

Finally, there is his conscie