Page:The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia.djvu/151

Rh my best informant and chief favourite, Tokulubakiki, made him a good mate, for the two were well-matched in looks, in dignity, in decency of character and in sweetness of temper (see pl. 26). Mitakata and his wife Orayayse, before their divorce, Towese'i and Ta'uya; Namwana Guya'u and Ibomala were all, in spite of occasional differences, excellent friends and companions. Between older couples also a real affection is sometimes found. The chief, To'uluwa, for instance, was genuinely attached to his wife, Kadamwasila. But affection, in some cases, is not sufficient to stand against the stress of circumstance. Thus Mitakata and Orayayse, an exemplary couple when I first knew them in 1915, were forced apart by the quarrel between the husband and the wife's kinsman, Namwana Guya'u (ch. i, sec. 2). Two of the finest looking people whom I knew in the Trobriands, Tomeda of Kasana'i, and his wife, Sayabiya, whom I had supposed most tenderly attached during my first visit, were already divorced on my return. But the existence of attachments lasting into old age shows that conjugal affection in the Trobriands can be real, even though perhaps it is not always deep.

I seldom witnessed quarrels or heard bad language among married people. If a woman is a shrew {uriweri) and the husband not sufficiently dominated to bear the fact meekly, or vice versa, marriage is so easily dissolved that there is hardly ever an unsuccessful match which survives the first outbreak long. I can remember only two or three households, where relations between husband and wife were outwardly and chronically strained. Two married Rh