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PARTISAN REVIEW
bathroom, in readiness for the girl's visit. This custodianship, for most
men of feeling, amounted to a sacred trust; the very intimacy of the
articles precluded the presence of other women in the apartment, who
might open drawers or the medicine-cabinet or even feel themselves
entitled to use the douche-bag hallowed to "her." With a married
woman, if the affair were serious, the situation was the same: she
bought a second pessary and a douche-bag, which she kept in her
lover's apartment, where they exercised a restraining influence if he
felt tempted to betray her. A man entrusted with a douche and a
pessary was bonded, so to speak; if he strayed with another woman,
he preferred to do it elsewhere, in a hotel or other premises not con–
secrated by these sacral reminders. In the same way, a married woman
pledged her faithfulness in infidelity by committing her second pessary
to her lover's care; only a married woman of very coarse fiber would
use the same pessary for both husband and lover. One adventurous
wife of John's acquaintance was said to have pessaries all over town,
like a sailor with a wife in every port, while her husband, a busy
stage-director, kept himself assured, as he thought, of her good be–
havior by a daily inspection of the little box in her medicine cabinet,
where the conjugal pessary lay in its dusting of talcum powder.
Furthermore, John said, the disposal of the pessary and douche–
bag presented a delicate problem when a love affair was to be termin–
ated. What was the man to do with these hygienic relics that were
left on his hands when he or the woman tired? They could not be
returned through the mail, like love letters or an engagement ring,
though crude lads had been known to do this; on the other hand, they
could not be discarded in the trash-basket for the janitor or landlady
to pick up; they would not burn in the fireplace, without giving off
an awful smell, and to keep them for another woman was unthink–
able. A man could carry them, stuffed into a paper bag, to one of
the city waste-baskets late at night or early in the morning or dump
them into the river, but such missions were fraught with humiliation
and an irrational fear of the police. Indeed, the possession of a
woman's pessary and fountain syringe made the modern man her cap–
tive. These appliances were the corpus delicti of the dead love-affair
that remained to haunt the murderer, like a body crammed into a
trunk. Short of keeping them, like grim testimonies, on a closet shelf,
the best method of handling them was to do as murderers did in
