This is not the only reason why married men visit prostitutes.  Even men who are happily married to women in all chief respects fitted to them, are apt to find, after some years of married life, a mysterious craving for variety.  They are not tired of their wives, they have not the least wish or intention to abandon them, they will not, if they can help it, give them the slightest pain.  But from time to time they are led by an almost irresistible and involuntary impulse to seek a temporary intimacy with women to whom nothing would persuade them to join themselves permanently.  Pepys, whose Diary, in addition to its other claims upon us, is a psychological document of unique importance, furnishes a very characteristic example of this kind of impulse.  He had married a young and charming wife, to whom he is greatly attached, and he lives happily with her, save for a few occasional domestic quarrels soon healed by kisses; his love is witnessed by his jealousy, a jealousy which, as he admits, is quite unreasonable, for she is a faithful and devoted wife.  Yet a few years after marriage, and in the midst of a life of strenuous official activity, Pepys cannot resist the temptation to seek the temporary favors of other women, seldom prostitutes, but nearly always women of low social class—­shop women, workmen’s wives, superior servant-girls.  Often he is content to invite them to a quiet ale-house, and to take a few trivial liberties.  Sometimes they absolutely refuse to allow more than this; when that happens he frequently thanks Almighty God (as he makes his entry in his Diary at night) that he has been saved from temptation and from loss of time and money; in any case, he is apt to vow that it shall never occur again.  It always does occur again.  Pepys is quite sincere with himself; he makes no attempt at justification or excuse; he knows that he has yielded to a temptation; it is an impulse that comes over him at intervals, an impulse that he seems unable long to resist.  Throughout it all he remains an estimable and diligent official, and in most respects a tolerably virtuous man, with a genuine dislike of loose people and loose talk.  The attitude of Pepys is brought out with incomparable simplicity and sincerity because he is setting down these things for his own eyes only, but his case is substantially that of a vast number of other men, perhaps indeed of the typical homme moyen sensuel (see Pepys, Diary, ed.  Wheatley; e.g., vol. iv, passim).

There is a third class of married men, less considerable in number but not unimportant, who are impelled to visit prostitutes:  the class of sexually perverted men.  There are a great many reasons why such men may desire to be married, and in some cases they marry women with whom they find it possible to obtain the particular