first purpose of female life is marriage and maternity; and that, for their own sakes as for the sake of each successive generation, women should be so trained as to be attractive wives and mothers of healthy children, all other considerations being subordinated to these. 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. They are promised a permanent maintenance from their master's estate, and promise in return a fixed term of marriage. After two or three years they are free to rescind the contract; after ten or twelve they
