him, and will sometimes
help to knit the bonds a bit closer.

There is another important reason for being interested in and
understanding your husband's business. When the husband dies--and a
man is not infrequently snatched away in the prime of youth and
vigor--the wife is often left to the mercies of the cold world,
without money and without a profession. If she understands the
husband's business she can continue it and remain economically
independent. This has reference not only to ordinary business, like
stores or agencies, but to more or less specialized occupations, such
for instance as publishing. We know the cases of two widows of
publishers of medical journals. When their husbands died everybody was
commiserating with them: what will they make a living from? But they
understood the details of their husbands' business, and they kept
right on. And now those journals are financially more successful than
they were when the husbands were at the helm.

=Wife's Behavior Toward Sexual Relations.= I am now coming to a
delicate subject. But, delicate though it is, it must be dealt with
unflinchingly, because it is probably responsible for more male
infidelity than all other causes combined. I speak of the relation of
the wife to her marital duties, in other words, to sexual relations.
Too many women regard the sexual act as a nuisance, as an ordeal, as
something disagreeable to get through with as quickly as possible;
they regard the husband's demands in this line as an imposition, as
unfair or even as brutal; and their behavior preliminary to and during
the act is such as to cool the ardor of any refined and sensitive man.
The reasons for this behavior on the part of many wives are manifold;
this is not the place to consider them in detail. I will allude to
them briefly. One great cause is congenital frigidity. The woman is
cold, frigid, has no desire for sex relations and experiences no
pleasure, no sensation from them. Such women are not to blame; they
are to be pitied. But even they can behave so as not to repel their
husbands. (See Chapter XLIII).

Another great cause is the vicious, prudish bringing up, by which the
sex act is regarded as something unclean, indecent, animal-like,
brutal. Such Women need a good "talking-to," and if they are only not
natural born fools, one good explanation often fixes matters. On a par
with this general prudishness is the infamous idea promulgated by a
few semi-insane, mentally