The Wheel of Life by Ellen Glasgow

When Kemper looked at his watch on Laura's steps, he found that he had time only to pay a promised call on Gerty Bridewell before he must hurry home to get into his dinner clothes. In his pocket, carelessly thrust there as he left his rooms, was a note from Gerty begging him to drop in upon her for a bit of twilight gossip; and though the request was made with her accustomed lightness, he knew instinctively that she had sought him less for diversion than for advice, and that her reckless pen had been guided by some hidden agitation. When he thought of her it was with a sympathy hardly justified by the outward brilliance of her life -- wealth, beauty, power, all the things which he would have called desirable were hers, and the vague compassion she awoke in him appeared to him the result of a simple trick of pathos which she knew how to assume at times.

To be sorry for Gerty was absurd, he had always looked upon a hunger for married romance as a morbid and unhealthy passion, and that a woman who possessed a generous husband should demand a faithful one as well seemed to him the freak of an unreasonable and exacting temper. "Men were not born monogamous" -- it was a favourite cynicism of his, for he was inclined to throw upon nature the full burden of her responsibility.