Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/81

Rh of another, perhaps worthier, person. This sort of jealousy arises either from weakness, which from a sense of its own want of lovable qualities is not convinced of being sure of its cause, or from distrust, which perhaps, by applying its own standard inversely, thinks the beloved person capable of infidelity. Sometimes all these motives may act together.

The lowest species of jealousy is a sort of avarice or envy which, without being capable of love, at least wishes to possess the object of its jealousy alone by the one party assuming a sort of property right over the other. This jealousy, which might be called the Sultanic, is generally to be found with old withered "husbands" whom the devil has prompted to marry young women and who forthwith dream night and day of cuckold's horns. These Argus-eyed keepers are no longer capable of any feeling that could be called love, they are rather as a rule heartless housetyrants; at the same time they cannot, therefore, make their wife happy. But they grudge her every happy relationship, because their egotism will not allow them to admit their own incapacity by granting her a compensation, or because they wish to possess alone the very thing they do not deserve, in order to abuse it. They revenge their own want of amiability by deposing from office, so to speak, the (real or supposed) amiability of their wife. I have known a man who, loathed by