§ 182
The case cited by Ellis (that of Mrs. Samuel Pepys, as recounted in the famous diary) contains only the man’s side. Possibly if the lady’s side were known it would be found that she was herself deficient in love and that she dreaded her husband’s possibly finding a woman who could react toward him in a more complete and satisfactory way than she could herself, this entirely apart from the question whether or not it should be the duty of the man to evoke such a response. She would feel unhappy and all the more conscious if she knew it was his duty and that he had fled from her to others where perhaps the task would be easier.
It is also insignificant that Pepys himself records: “I must here remark that I have lain with my moher (wife) as a husband more times since this falling out than in, I believe, twelve months before, and with more pleasure to her than in all the time of our marriage before.” This cannot be adduced as a proof that the jealousy aroused in the wife was the cause of any improvement in the marital relations of the Pepyses, but that his noting an increase in her pleasure simply indicates that because of his own lack of imagination he had not been playing the husband’s part for the preceding twelvemonth as he should have. His own imagination was probably stirred by “Deb’s” propinquity; as it would not have been had his erotic life with his wife been on the high passional level it should. This is the only reason why a little jealousy is supposed to whet the edge of love. If Pepys had been grounded in true love instead of a small-minded man, flinging notes to his wife’s maid, advising her to help him out in the lie he told his wife, he would not have failed so to control his wife’s erotic emotions that she would have outshone any other woman in attractiveness.