curious twist of fate, one of the underlying causes of their
precarious economic condition before marriage rescues them.
In a civilization which lays its greatest stress upon an uninspired and
almost automatic expertness, and offers its highest rewards to the
more intricate forms thereof, they suffer the disadvantage of being
less capable of it than men. Part of this disadvantage, as we have
seen, is congenital; their very intellectual enterprise makes it difficult
for them to become the efficient machines that men are. But part of
it is also due to the fact that, with marriage always before them,
coloring their every vision of the future, and holding out a steady
promise of swift and complete relief, they are under no such
implacable pressure as men are to acquire the sordid arts they revolt
against. The time is too short and the incentive too feeble. Before
the woman employs of twenty-one can master a tenth of the
idiotic"knowledge" in the head of the male clerk of thirty, or even
convince herself that it is worth mastering, she has married the head
of the establishment or maybe the clerk himself, and so abandons
the business. It is, indeed, not until a woman has definitely put
away the hope of marriage, or, at all events, admitted the
possibility that she, may have to do so soon or late, that she buckles
down in earnest to whatever craft she practises, and makes a
genuine effort to develop competence. No sane man, seeking a
woman for a post requiring laborious training and unremitting
diligence, would select a woman still definitely young and
marriageable. To the contrary, he would choose either a woman so
unattractive sexually as to be palpably incapable of snaring a man,
or one so embittered by some catastrophe of amour as to be
pathologically emptied of the normal aspirations of her sex.