more to gain by the business than men, and so they are prompted by
their cooler sagacity tenter upon it on the most favourable terms
possible, and with the minimum admixture of disarming emotion.
Men almost invariably get their mates by the process called falling in
love; save among the aristocracies of the North and Latin men, the
marriage of convenience is relatively rare; a hundred men marry
"beneath" them to every woman who perpetrates the same folly.
And what is meant by this so-called falling in love? What is meant
by it is a procedure whereby a man accounts for the fact of his
marriage, after feminine initiative and generalship have made it
inevitable, by enshrouding it in a purple maze of romance--in brief,
by setting up the doctrine that an obviously self-possessed and
mammalian woman, engaged deliberately in the most important
adventure of her life, and with the keenest understanding of its
utmost implications, is a naive, tender, moony and almost
disembodied creature, enchanted and made perfect by a passion that
has stolen upon her unawares, and which she could not
acknowledge, even to herself, without blushing to death. By this
preposterous doctrine, the defeat and enslavement of the man is
made glorious, and even gifted with a touch of flattering
naughtiness. The sheer horsepower of his wooing has assailed and
overcome her maiden modesty; she trembles in his arms; he has
been granted a free franchise to work his wicked will upon her.
Thus do the ambulant images of God cloak their shackles proudly,
and divert the judicious with their boastful shouts.


Women, it is almost needless to point out, are much more cautious
about embracing the conventional hocus-pocus of the situation.
They never acknowledge that they have fallen in love, as the phrase