ot affect its truth.

Let me say a few words more on this point. There are those who, while
they pity the two millions and a half, or more, of unmarried women
earning their own bread, are tempted to do no more than pity them, from
the mistaken notion that after all it is their own fault, or at least the
fault of nature. They ought (it is fancied) to have been married: or at
least they ought to have been good-looking enough and clever enough to be
married. They are the exceptions, and for exceptions we cannot
legislate. We must take care of the average article, and let the refuse
take care of itself. I have put plainly, it may be somewhat coarsely, a
belief which I believe many men hold, though they are too manly to
express it. But the belief itself is false. It is false even of the
lower classes. Among them, the cleverest, the most prudent, the most
thoughtful, are those who, either in domestic service or a few--very few,
alas!--other callings, attain comfortable and responsible posts which
they do not care to leave for any marriage, especially when that marriage
puts the savings of their life at the mercy of the husband--and they see
but too many miserable instances of what that implies. The very
refinement which they have acquired in domestic service often keeps them
from wedlock. 'I shall never marry,' said an admirable nurse, the
daughter of a common agricultural labourer. 'After being so many years
among gentlefolk, I could not live with a man who was not a scholar, and
did not bathe every day.'

And if this be true of the lower class, it is still more true of some, at
least, of the classes above them. Many a 'lady' who remains unmarried
does so, not for want of suitors, but simply from nobleness of mind;
because others are dependent on her for support; or because she will not
degrade herself by marrying for marrying's sake. How often does one see
all that can make a woman attractive--talent, wit, education, health,
beauty,--possessed by one who never will enter holy wedlock. 'What a
loss,' one says, 'that such a woman should not have married, if it were
but for the sake of the children she might have borne to the State.'
'Perhaps,' answer wise women of the world, 'she did not see any one whom
she could condescend to many.'

And thus it is that a very large proportion of the spinsters of England,
so far from being, as silly boys and wicked old men fancy, the refuse of
their sex, are the very _elite_