e entire
feminine sex profoundly--the exact nature of this influence we may now
consider.

The gist of this inquiry lies in the fact that, while a man's starting
position in this world of to-day is entirely determined by the
conditions of his birth and early training, and his final position the
slow elaborate outcome of his own sustained efforts to live, a woman,
from the age of sixteen onward--as the world goes now--is essentially
adventurous, the creature of circumstances largely beyond her control
and foresight. A virile man, though he, too, is subject to accidents,
may, upon most points, still hope to plan and determine his life; the
life of a woman is all accident. Normally she lives in relation to some
specific man, and until that man is indicated her preparation for life
must be of the most tentative sort. She lives, going nowhere, like a
cabman on the crawl, and at any time she may find it open to her to
assist some pleasure-loving millionaire to spend his millions, or to
play her part in one of the many real, original, and only derivatives of
the former aristocratic "Society" that have developed themselves among
independent people. Even if she is a serious and labour-loving type,
some shareholder may tempt her with the prospect of developing her
exceptional personality in ease and freedom and in "doing good" with his
money. With the continued growth of the shareholding class, the
brighter-looking matrimonial chances, not to speak of the glittering
opportunities that are not matrimonial, will increase. Reading is now
the privilege of all classes, there are few secrets of etiquette that a
clever lower-class girl will fail to learn, there are few such girls,
even now, who are not aware of their wide opportunities, or at least
their wide possibilities, of luxury and freedom, there are still fewer
who, knowing as much, do not let it affect their standards and
conception of life. The whole mass of modern fiction written by women
for women, indeed, down to the cheapest novelettes, is saturated with
the romance of _mesalliance_. And even when the specific man has
appeared, the adventurous is still not shut out of a woman's career. A
man's affections may wander capriciously and leave him but a little
poorer or a little better placed; for the women they wander from,
however, the issue is an infinitely graver one, and the serious
wandering of a woman's fancy may mean the beginning of a new world for
her. At any moment th