and really I am tempted
to believe that it was literal lunacy. Last night were you drunk?'

'I had drunk nothing. Listen, and I will tell you all about it. I am a fool
about women. I don't know what it is--certainly not a sensual or passionate
nature; mine is nothing of the sort. It's sheer sentimentality, I suppose.
I can't be friendly with a woman without drifting into mawkish
tenderness--there's the simple truth. If I had married happily, I don't
think I should have been tempted to go about philandering. The society of a
wife I loved and respected would be sufficient. But there's that need in
me--the incessant hunger for a woman's sympathy and affection. Such a
hideous mistake as mine when I married would have made a cynic of most men;
upon me the lesson has been utterly thrown away. I mean that, though I can
talk of women rationally enough with a friend, I am at their mercy when
alone with them--at the mercy of the silliest, vulgarest creature. After
all, isn't it very much the same with men in general? The average man--how
does he come to marry? Do you think he deliberately selects? Does he fall
in love, in the strict sense of the phrase, with that one particular girl?
No; it comes about by chance--by the drifting force of circumstances. Not
one man in ten thousand, when he thinks of marriage, waits for the ideal
wife--for the woman who makes capture of his soul or even of his senses.
Men marry without passion. Most of us have a very small circle for choice;
the hazard of everyday life throws us into contact with this girl or that,
and presently we begin to feel either that we have compromised ourselves,
or that we might as well save trouble and settle down as soon as possible,
and the girl at hand will do as well as another. More often than not it is
the girl who decides for us. In more than half the marriages it's the woman
who has practically proposed. She puts herself in a man's way. With her it
rests almost entirely whether a man shall think of her as a possible wife
or not. She has endless ways of putting herself forward without seeming to
do so. As often as not, it's mere passivity that effects the end. She has
only to remain seated instead of moving away; to listen with a smile
instead of looking bored; to be at home instead of being out,--and she is
making love to a man. In a Palace of Truth how many husbands would have to
confess that it decidedly surprised them when they found themselves engaged
to be marr