That alone is a great misfortune, all the more tragic since under favourable conditions, which it should have been natural to attain, it might so easily be avoided.  But there is this further result, full of the possibilities of domestic tragedy, that the wife so situated, however innocent, however virtuous, may at any time find her virginally sensitive emotional nature fertilised by the touch of some other man than her husband.

It happens so often.  A girl who has been carefully guarded in the home, preserved from evil companions, preserved also from what her friends regarded as the contamination of sexual knowledge, a girl of high ideals, yet healthy and robust, is married to a man of whom she probably has little more than a conventional knowledge.  Yet he may by good chance be the masculine counterpart of herself, well brought up, without sexual experience and ignorant of all but the elementary facts of sex, loyal and honourable, prepared to be, fitted to be, a devoted husband.  The union seems to be of the happiest kind; no one detects that anything is lacking to this perfect marriage; in course of time one or more children are born.  But during all this time the husband has never really made love to his wife; he has not even understood what courtship in the intimate sense means; love as an art has no existence for him; he has loved his wife according to his imperfect knowledge, but he has never so much as realised that his knowledge was imperfect.  She on her side loves her husband; she comes in time indeed to have a sort of tender maternal feeling for him.  Possibly she feels a little pleasure in intercourse with him.  But she has never once been profoundly aroused, and she has never once been utterly satisfied.  The deep fountains of her nature have never been unsealed; she has never been fertilised throughout her whole nature by their liberating influence; her erotic personality has never been developed.  Then something happens.  Perhaps the husband is called away, it may have been to take part in the Great War.  The wife, whatever her tender solicitude for her absent partner, feels her solitude and is drawn nearer to friends, perhaps her husband’s friends.  Some man among them becomes congenial to her.  There need be no conscious or overt love-making on either side, and if there were the wife’s loyalty might be aroused and the friendship brought to an end.  Love-making is not indeed necessary.  The wife’s latent erotic needs, while still remaining unconscious, have come nearer to the surface; now that she has grown mature and that they have been stimulated yet unsatisfied for so long, they have, unknown to herself, become insistent and sensitive to a sympathetic touch.  The friends may indeed grow into lovers, and then some sort of solution, by divorce or intrigue—­scarcely however a desirable kind of solution—­becomes possible.  But we are here taking the highest ground and assuming that honourable feeling, domestic affection, or a stern sense of moral duty, renders