Marriage as a Trade | Page 6

to love.
No one can imagine that it is the same who has ever heard one haggard,
underpaid girl cry to another, in a burst of bitter confidence --
"I would marry any one, to get out of this." Which, if one comes to
think of it, is hard on "any one."
II
IF I am right in my view that marriage for woman has always been not
only a trade, but a trade that is practically compulsory, I have at the
same time furnished an explanation of the reason why women, as a rule,
are so much less romantic than men where sexual attraction is
concerned. Where the man can be single-hearted, the woman
necessarily is double-motived. It is, of course, the element of commerce
and compulsion that accounts for this difference of attitude; an impulse
that may have to be discouraged, nurtured or simulated to order -- that
is, at any rate, expected, for commercial or social reasons to put in an
appearance as a matter of course and at the right and proper moment --
can never have the same vigour, energy and beauty as an impulse that
is unfettered and unforced.
More than once in my life I have been struck by the beauty of a man's
honest conception and ideal of love and marriage -- a conception and
ideal which one comes across in unexpected and unlikely persons and
which is by no means confined to those whose years are still few in

number and whose hearts are still hot within them. Only a few weeks
ago I heard an elderly gentleman of scientific attainments talk
something which, but for its sincerity, would have seemed to me sheer
sentimental balderdash concerning the relations of men and women.
And from other equally respectable gentlemen I have heard opinions
that were beautiful as well as honest on the relations of the sexes, of a
kind that no woman, being alone with another woman, would ever
venture to utter. For we see the thing differently. I am not so foolish as
to imagine that theory and practice in this or any other matter are in the
habit of walking hand in hand; I know that for men the word love has
two different meanings and therefore I should be sorry to have to affirm
on oath that the various gentlemen who have, at various times,
favoured me with their views on the marriage question have one and all
lived up to their convictions; but at least their conception of the love
and duty owed by man and woman to each other was a high one,
honourable, not wanting in reverence, not wanting in romance. Over
and over again I have heard women unreticent enough upon the same
subject; but, when they spoke their hearts, the picturesque touch -- the
flash and fire of romance -- was never nearly so strong and sometimes
altogether absent.
And I have never seen love -- the sheer passionate and personal delight
in and worship of a being of the other sex -- so vividly and
uncontrollably expressed on the face of a woman as on the face of a
man. I have with me, as one of the things not to be forgotten, the
memory of a cheap foreign hotel where, two or three years back, a little
Cockney clerk was making holiday in worshipful attendance on the girl
he was engaged to. At table I used to watch him, being very sure that he
had no eyes for me; and once or twice I had the impulse that I should
like to speak to him and thank him for what he had shown me. I have
seen women in love time after time, but none in whom the fire burned
as it burned in him -- consumedly. I used to hope his Cockney goddess
would have understanding at least to reverence the holy thing that
passed the love of women . . . .
How should it be otherwise -- this difference in the attitude of man and
woman in their relations to each other? To make them see and feel

more alike in the matter, the conditions under which they live and
bargain must be made more alike. With even the average man love and
marriage may be something of a high adventure, entered upon
whole-heartedly and because he so desires. With the average woman it
is not a high adventure -- except in so far as adventure means risk -- but
a destiny or necessity. If not a monetary necessity, then a social. (How
many children, I wonder, are born each year merely because their
mothers were afraid of being called old maids? One can imagine no
more inadequate reason for bringing a human being into the world.)
The fact that