es that he is sinning in being unfaithful, and who
understands that outside opinion is nothing in the soiling of his own
soul, but that the matter is between himself and God, will always be
faithful _in body_ to a woman he has wedded, whether he cares for her
or not. But a man who has not this conviction, and who does not live
in this intimate relation to God, has no reason to hold him from
indulging his natural instinct, except the fear of being found out,
and when his sagacity has suggested safeguards against this, his
instinct will certainly give itself expression. It is all a question
of personal belief. There are numbers of good and honest characters
who do not feel convinced that entire fidelity in man to one woman was
intended by the Creator, and who therefore feel no degradation in the
latitude they allow themselves. It is not for us to argue which are
right and which are wrong, but to stick to the subject of marriage and
how it can perhaps be made happier in these present days, when all
other conditions of life are changing, by a better comprehension of
fundamental instincts and laws of nature.

Woman has developed so far that generally she thinks she is (and
sometimes she really is!) a reasonable and balanced creature, with
strong individuality--and personal tastes and likes and dislikes. She
is now ill-fitted to keep them all in subservience to man, unless he
is her intellectual master. She may have wedded only because the
emotion of sex (not understood as such, and called by a number of
other names such as "love," "devotion," "attraction") forced her at
one of its powerful moments to take a physical mate--totally unsuited
to her moral calibre. But she has knelt at the altar and sworn vows
before God--and perhaps has fulfilled woman's original mission in the
world, and become the mother of children--so what is to be done to
rectify her mistake and its unhappy consequences?

She must look the whole circumstances of it in the face and ask
herself whether she herself threw dust in her own eyes as regards the
character of her husband, whether he deceived her in this, or whether
they just drifted together, each to blame as much as the other,
through the attraction of sex and the cruelty of ignorance. She may
regret it a thousandfold--but she has done the thing of her own free
will, no one forced her to wed the man; she may have done so
unwillingly in some cases--and for ulterior motives, but at all events
she wa