The feminine talent for concealing emotion is probably largely
responsible for the common masculine belief that women are devoid of
passion, and contemplate its manifestations in the male with something
akin to trembling. Here the talent itself is helped out by the fact
that very few masculine observers, on the occasions when they give
attention to the matter, are in a state of mind conducive to exact
observation. The truth is, of course, that there is absolutely no
reason to believe that the normal woman is passionless, or that the
minority of women who unquestionably are is of formidable dimensions.
To be sure, the peculiar vanity of men, particularly in the Northern
countries, makes them place a high value upon the virginal type of
woman, and so this type tends to grow more common by sexual selection,
but despite that fact, it has by no means superseded the normal type,
so realistically described by the theologians and publicists of the
Middle Ages. It would, however, be rash to assert that this long
continued sexual selection has not made itself felt, even in the normal
type. Its chief effect, perhaps, is to make it measurably easier for a
woman to conquer and conceal emotion than it is for a man. But this is
a mere reinforcement of a native quality or, at all events, a quality
long antedating the rise of the curious preference just mentioned. That
preference obviously owes its origin to the concept of private property
and is most evident in those countries in which the largest proportion
of males are property owners, i.e., in which the property-owning caste
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.