herself a satisfactory husband, or even a highly imperfect husband,
is regarded with respect by other women, and has a
contemptuous patronage for those who have failed to do likewise.
Again, marriage offers her the only safe opportunity, considering
the levantine view of women as property which Christianity has
preserved in our civilization, to obtain gratification for that powerful
complex of instincts which we call the sexual, and, in particular, for
the instinct of maternity. The woman who has not had a child
remains incomplete, ill at ease, and more than a little ridiculous.
She is in the position of a man who has never stood in battle; she
has missed the most colossal experience of her sex. Moreover, a
social odium goes with her loss. Other women regard her as a sort
of permanent tyro, and treat her with ill-concealed disdain, and
deride the very virtue which lies at the bottom of her experiential
penury. There would seem to be, indeed, but small respect among
women for virginity per se. They are against the woman who has
got rid of hers outside marriage, not because they think she has lost
anything intrinsically valuable, but because she has made a bad
bargain, and one that materially diminishes the sentimental respect
for virtue held by men, and hence one against the general
advantage an dwell-being of the sex. In other words, it is a
guild resentment that they feel, not a moral resentment. Women, in
general, are not actively moral, nor, for that matter, noticeably
modest. Every man, indeed, who is in wide practice among them is
occasionally astounded and horrified to discover, on some rainy
afternoon, an almost complete absence of modesty in some women
of the highest respectability.


But of all things that a woman gains by marriage the most valuable