ste reaches down into the lowest
conceivable strata of bounders and ignoramuses. The low-caste man is
never quite sure of his wife unless he is convinced that she is entirely
devoid of amorous susceptibility. Thus he grows uneasy whenever she
shows any sign of responding in kind to his own elephantine emotions,
and is apt to be suspicious of even so trivial a thing as a hearty
response to a connubial kiss. If he could manage to rid himself of such
suspicions, there would be less public gabble about anesthetic wives,
and fewer books written by quacks with sure cures for them, and a good
deal less cold-mutton formalism and boredom at the domestic hearth.

I have a feeling that the husband of this sort--he is very common in the
United States, and almost as common among the middle classes of England,
Germany and Scandinavia--does himself a serious disservice, and that he
is uneasily conscious of it. Having got himself a wife to his austere
taste, he finds that she is rather depressing--that his vanity is almost
as painfully damaged by her emotional inertness as it would have been
by a too provocative and hedonistic spirit. For the thing that chiefly
delights a man, when some, woman has gone through the solemn buffoonery
of yielding to his great love, is the sharp and flattering contrast
between her reserve in the presence of other men and her enchanting
complaisance in the presence of himself. Here his vanity is enormously
tickled. To the world in general she seems remote and unapproachable; to
him she is docile, fluttering, gurgling, even a bit abandoned. It is
as if some great magnifico male, some inordinate czar or kaiser, should
step down from the throne to play dominoes with him behind the door.
The greater the contrast between the lady's two fronts, the greater
his satisfaction-up to, of course, the point where his suspicions are
aroused. Let her diminish that contrast ever so little on the public
side--by smiling at a handsome actor, by saying a word too many to an
attentive head-waiter, by holding the hand of the rector of the parish,
by winking amiably at his brother or at her sister's husband--and at once
the poor fellow begins to look for clandestine notes, to employ private
inquiry agents, and to scrutinize the eyes, ears, noses and hair of his
children with shameful doubts. This explains many domestic catastrophes.

15. Mythical Anthropophagi

The man-hating woman, like the cold woman, is largely ima