s costs a great deal more than a wife; in the open
market of the world she can get more. It is only the rare man who can
conceal enough of his income from his wife to pay for a morganatic
affair. And most of the men clever enough to do this are too clever to
be intrigued.

I have said that 95 per cent. of married men are faithful. I believe the
real proportion is nearer 99 per cent. What women mistake for infidelity
is usually no more than vanity. Every man likes to be regarded as a
devil of a fellow, and particularly by his wife. On the one hand, it
diverts her attention from his more genuine shortcomings, and on the
other hand it increases her respect for him. Moreover, it gives her a
chance to win the sympathy of other women, and so satisfies that craving
for martyrdom which is perhaps woman's strongest characteristic. A
woman who never has any chance to suspect her husband feels cheated and
humiliated. She is in the position of those patriots who are induced to
enlist for a war by pictures of cavalry charges, and then find
themselves told off to wash the general's underwear.

XXIV

A THEOLOGICAL MYSTERY

The moral order of the world runs aground on hay fever. Of what use is
it? Why was it invented? Cancer and hydrophobia, at least, may be
defended on the ground that they kill. Killing may have some benign
purpose, some esoteric significance, some cosmic use. But hay fever
never kills; it merely tortures. No man ever died of it. Is the torture,
then, an end in itself? Does it break the pride of strutting, snorting
man, and turn his heart to the things of the spirit? Nonsense! A man
with hay fever is a natural criminal. He curses the gods, and defies
them to kill him. He even curses the devil. Is its use, then, to prepare
him for happiness to come--for the vast ease and comfort of
convalescence? Nonsense again! The one thing he is sure of, the one
thing he never forgets for a moment, is that it will come back again
next year.

XXV

THE TEST OF TRUTH

The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few religious dogmas have ever
faced it and survived. Huxley laughed the devils out of the Gadarene
swine. Dowie's whiskers broke the back of Dowieism. Not the laws of the
United States but the mother-in-law joke brought the Mormons to
compromise and surrender. Not the horror of it but the absurdity of it
killed the doctrine of infant damnation.... But the razor edge of
ridicule is turned by the tough hid