“Of the four wives of a certain prince, the eldest had borne him two sons; she was therefore his favorite, and her face beamed with happiness....  But oh! what contrast to this happiness was presented in the apartments of the childless three.  Their faces were sad and careworn; there seemed no hope for them in this world, since their lord was displeased with them on account of their misfortune.”

“A lady friend of mine in Calcutta told me that her husband had warned her not to give birth to a girl, the first time, or he would never see her face again.”  Another woman

“had been notified by her husband that if she persisted in bearing daughters she should be superseded by another wife, have coarse clothes to wear, scanty food to eat,” etc.[127]

WHY CONJUGAL PRECEDES ROMANTIC LOVE

The conclusion to be drawn from the testimony collected in this chapter is that genuine conjugal love—­the affection for a wife for her own sake—­is, like romantic love, a product chiefly of modern civilization.

I say chiefly, because I am convinced that conjugal love was known sooner than romantic love, and for a very simple reason.  Among those of the lower races where the sexes were not separated in youth, a license prevailed which led to shallow, premature, temporary alliances that precluded all idea of genuine affection, even had these folk been capable of such a sentiment; while among those tribes and peoples that practised the custom of separating the boys and girls from the earliest age, and not allowing them to become acquainted till after marriage, the growth of real, prematrimonial affection was, of course, equally impossible.  In married life this was different.  Living together for years, having a common interest in their children, sharing the same joys and sorrows, husband and wife would learn the rudiments of sympathy, and in happy cases there would be an opportunity for the growth of liking, attachment, fondness, or even, in exceptional instances, of affection.  I cannot sufficiently emphasize the fact that my theory is psychological or cultural, not chronological.  The fact that a man lives in the year 1900 makes it no more self-evident that he should be capable of sexual affection than the fact that a man lived seven centuries before Christ makes it self-evident that he could not love affectionately.  Hector and Andromache existed only in the brain of Homer, who was in many respects thousands of years ahead of his contemporaries.  Whether such a couple could really have existed at that time among the Trojans, or the Greeks, we do not know, but in any case it would have been an exception, proving the rule by the painful contrast of the surrounding barbarism.

Exceptions may possibly occur among the lower races, through happy combinations of circumstances.  C.C.  Jones describes (69) a picture of conjugal devotion among Cherokee Indians: