A certain small
number of ladies avail themselves of the legal equality they still
enjoy, and live in the world much as men. But we regard them as
third-rate men in petticoats, hardly as women at all. Marriage with
one of them is the last resource to which a man too idle or too
foolish to earn his own living will betake himself. Whatever their
education, our women have always found that such independence as they
could earn by hard work was less satisfactory than the dependence,
coupled with assured comfort and ease, which they enjoy as the
consorts, playthings, or slaves of the other sex; and they are only
too glad to barter their legal equality for the certainty of
protection, indolence, and permanent support."
"Then your marriages," I said, "are permanent?"
"Not by law," he replied. "Nothing like what our remote ancestors
called marriage is recognised at all. The maidens who come of age each
year sell themselves by a sort of auction, those who purchase them
arranging with the girls themselves the terms on which the latter will
enter their family. Custom has fixed the general conditions which
every girl expects, and which only the least attractive are forced to
forego.
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