is economic security. Such security, of course, is seldom absolute,
but usually merely relative: the best provider among husbands may
die without enough life insurance, or run off with some
preposterous light of love, or become an invalid or insane, or step
over the intangible and wavering line which separates business
success from a prison cell. Again, a woman may be deceived: there
are stray women who are credulous and sentimental, and stray men
who are cunning. Yet again, a woman may make false deductions
from evidence accurately before her, ineptly guessing that the clerk
she marries today will be the head of the firm tomorrow, instead of
merely the bookkeeper tomorrow. But on the whole it must be
plain that a woman, in marrying, usually obtains for herself a
reasonably secure position in that station of life to which she is
accustomed. She seeks a husband, not sentimentally, but
realistically; she always gives thought to the economic situation; she
seldom takes a chance if it is possible to avoid it. It is common for
men to marry women who bring nothing to the joint capital of
marriage save good looks and an appearance of vivacity; it is almost
unheard of for women to neglect more prosaic inquiries. Many a
rich man, at least in America, marries his typist or the governess of
his sister's children and is happy thereafter, but when a rare woman
enters upon a comparable marriage she is commonly set down as
insane, and the disaster that almost always ensues quickly confirms
the diagnosis.


The economic and social advantage that women thus seek in
marriage--and the seeking is visible no less in the kitchen wench
who aspires to the heart of a policeman than in the fashionable
flapper who looks for a husband with a Rolls-Royce--is, by a