There was but the one hope--marriage, a rich
marriage. It is the habit of men who can take care of
themselves and of women who are securely well taken
care of to scorn the woman or the helpless-bred man
who marries for money or even entertains that idea.
How little imagination these scorners have! To marry
for a mere living, hardly better than one could make
for oneself, assuredly does show a pitiful lack of self-
reliance, a melancholy lack of self-respect. But for
men or women all their lives used to luxury and with
no ability whatever at earning money--for such persons
to marry money in order to save themselves from
the misery and shame that poverty means to them is the
most natural, the most human action conceivable. The
man or the woman who says he or she would not do it,
either is a hypocrite or is talking without thinking.
You may in honesty criticize and condemn a social system
that suffers men and women to be so crudely and
criminally miseducated by being given luxury they did
not earn. But to condemn the victims of that system
for acting as its logic compels is sheer folly or sheer
phariseeism.

Would Mildred Gower have married for money? As
the weeks fled, as the bank account dwindled, she would
have grasped eagerly at any rich man who might have
offered himself--no matter how repellent he might
have been. She did not want a bare living; she did not
want what passes with the mass of middle-class people