I believe that the average woman would turn away from bigamy
with a deeper shudder than from any other stain of conjugal infidelity.
But there are exceptions to all modes of feeling and of reasoning.
Here is Alice Duvernois: she is a woman of good position, of intellectual
quickness, of unusual sensitiveness of spirit; yet she has thought out
this woeful question differently from the great majority of her sex. To
her, thirsty for sympathy and love, bound to a man who gives her neither,
grown feverish and delirious with the torment of an empty heart, it has
seemed that the sanctity of a second marriage will somehow cover the
violation of a first.
This aberration we can only explain on the ground that she was one of
those natures--mature in some respects, but strangely childlike in
others--whom most of us love to stigmatize as unpractical, and who in fact
never become quite accustomed to this world and its rules.
On the very evening of her arrival home she put to her husband a question
of infantile and almost incredible simplicity. It was one of the many
observations which made him tell her from time to time that she was a
fool.
"What do they do," she asked, "to women who marry two husbands?"
"They put them in jail," was his cool reply.
"I think it is brutal," she broke out indignantly, as if the iron gates
were already closing upon her, and she were contesting the justice of the
punishment.
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