showing off their little monkey-tricks, for conquest. The fault is
none of theirs. It is part of an erroneous system." Lady Jeune
expresses the orthodox English position when she asserts flatly that
"to deny that marriage is the object of woman's existence is absurd."
The anachronistic survival of the laws of primogeniture and entail
practically makes the marriage of the daughter the only alternative
for a descent to a lower sphere of society. In the United States the
proportion of girls who strike one as obvious candidates for marriage
is remarkably small. This _may_ be owing to the art with which the
American woman conceals her lures, but all the evidence points to its
being in the main an entirely natural and unconscious attitude. The
American girl has all along been so accustomed to associate on equal
terms with the other sex that she naturally and inevitably regards him
more in the light of a comrade than of a possible husband. She has so
many resources, and is so independent, that marriage does not bound
her horizon.

Her position, however, is not one of antagonism to marriage. If it
were, I should be the last to commend it. It rather rests on an
assurance of equality, on the assumption that marriage is an
honourable estate--a rounding and completing of existence--for man as
much as for woman. Nor does it mean, I think, any lack of passion and
the deepest instincts of womanhood. All these are present and can be
wakened by the right man at the right time. Indeed, the very fact that
marriage (with or without love) is not incessantly in the foreground
of an American girl's consciousness probably makes the awakening all
the more deep and tender because comparatively unanticipated and
unforeseen.

The marriages between American heiresses and European peers do not