Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/37

 returned to it in such numbers that to challenge the idea of chastity as a legal creation may be regarded as a rather distinctively Victorian contribution. From the question what to do when you are united to an undivorceable insane wife, the Victorians proceeded cautiously to consider the demands of virtue in analogous sets of circumstances. What is the point at which the maintenance of legal chastity involves the loss of ethical integrity? What is right conduct for a young girl whose parents or relatives have united her in a "suitable marriage" to a repellent brute of means and good family? That is a question which interested Thackeray in The Newcomes; and it will be remembered that the wife of Barnes Newcome answers the question in her own case by giving her husband occasion for divorce under the English law. It is not always observed that to Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter right conduct, to the last page of the book, consists in fidelity to her lover, not to her fanatical husband; and Hawthorne, perhaps indecently, places the lovers in adjacent graves of a Boston burying-ground. Isabel Archer, in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, is begged by her lover to desert her husband and come to him, and to disregard the "bottomless