company. He may want a cook and not a partner in his business, or
a partner in his business and not a cook. But in order to get the
precise thing or things that he wants, he has to take a lot of other
things that he doesn't want--that no sane man, in truth, could
imaginably want--and it is to the enterprise of forcing him into this
almost Armenian bargain that the woman of his "choice"addresses
herself. Once the game is fairly set, she searches out his weaknesses
with the utmost delicacy and accuracy, and plays upon them with all
her superior resources. He carries a handicap from the start. His
sentimental and unintelligent belief in theories that she knows quite
well are not true--e.g., the theory that she shrinks from him, and is
modestly appalled by the banal carnalities of marriage itself--gives
her a weapon against him which she drives home with instinctive
and compelling art. The moment she discerns this sentimentality
bubbling within him--that is, The moment his oafish smirks and eye
rollings signify that he has achieved the intellectual disaster that is
called falling in love--he is hers to do with as she will. Save for
acts of God, he is forthwith as good as married.




7.


The Feminine Attitude


This sentimentality in marriage is seldom, if ever, observed in
women. For reasons that we shall examine later, they have much