Marriage as a Trade | Page 7

her destiny, when he arrives, may be all that her heart
desires and deserves does not prevent him from being the thing that,
from her earliest years, she had, for quite other reasons, regarded as
inevitable. Quite consciously and from childhood the "not impossible
he" is looked upon, not simply as an end desirable in himself, but as a
means of subsistence. The marriageable man may seek his elective
affinity until he find her; the task of the marriageable woman is
infinitely more complicated, since her elective affinity has usually to be
combined with her bread and butter. The two do not always grow in the
same place.
What is the real, natural and unbiassed attitude of woman towards love
and marriage, it is perfectly impossible for even a woman to guess at
under present conditions, and it will continue to be impossible for just
so long as the natural instincts of her sex are inextricably interwoven
with, thwarted and deflected by, commercial considerations. When -- if
ever -- the day of woman's complete social and economic independence
dawns upon her, when she finds herself free and upright in a new world
where no artificial pressure is brought to bear upon her natural
inclinations or disinclinations, then, and then only, will it be possible to
untwist a tangled skein and judge to what extent and what precise
degree she is swayed by those impulses, sexual and maternal, which are
now, to the exclusion of every other factor, presumed to dominate her
existence. And not only to dominate, but to justify it. (A presumption,
by the way, which seems to ignore the fact -- incompatible, surely, with
the theory of "incompleteness" -- that celibacy irks the woman less than
it does the man.)

What, one wonders, would be the immediate result if the day of
independence and freedom from old restrictions were to dawn suddenly
and at once? Would it be to produce, at first and for a time, a rapid
growth amongst all classes of women of that indifference to, and
almost scorn of, marriage which is so marked a characteristic of the --
alas, small -- class who can support themselves in comfort by work
which is congenial to them? Perhaps -- for a time, until the revulsion
was over and things righted themselves. (I realize, of course, that it is
quite impossible for a male reader to accept the assertion that any one
woman, much less any class of women, however small its numbers, can
be indifferent to or scornful of marriage -- which would be tantamount
to admitting that she could be indifferent to, or scornful of, himself.
What follows, therefore, can only appear to him as an ineffectual
attempt on the part of an embittered spinster to explain that the grapes
are sour; and he is courteously requested to skip to the end of the
chapter. It would be lost labour on my part to seek to disturb his
deep-rooted conviction that all women who earn decent incomes in
intelligent and interesting ways are too facially unpleasant to be placed
at the head of a dinner-table. I shall not attempt to disturb that
conviction; I make it a rule never to attempt the impossible.) This
new-born attitude of open indifference and contempt, while perhaps
appearing strained and unnatural, is, it seems to me, a natural one
enough for women whose daily lives have falsified every tradition in
which they were born and bred.
For the tradition handed down from generations to those girl children
who now are women grown was, with exceptions few and far between,
the one tradition of marriage -- marriage as inevitable as lessons and far
more inevitable than death. Ordering dinner and keeping house: that we
knew well, and from our babyhood was all the future had to give to us.
For the boys there would be other things; wherefore our small hearts
bore a secret grudge against Almighty God that He had not made us
boys -- since their long thoughts were our long thoughts, and together
we wallowed in cannibals and waxed clamorous over engines. For them,
being boys, there might be cannibals and engines in the world beyond;
but for us -- oh, the flat sameness of it! -- was nothing but a husband,
ordering dinner and keeping house. Therefore we dreamed of a settler

for a husband, and of assisting him to shoot savages with a
double-barrelled gun. So might the round of household duties be varied
and most pleasantly enlivened.
Perhaps it was the stolid companionship of the doll, perhaps the
constant repetition of the formula "when you have children of your
own" that precluded any idea of shirking the husband and tackling the
savage off our own bat. For I cannot remember that we ever shirked
him. We