ed him into a more or less abhorrent compromise
with his own honest inclinations and best interests. Whether that
compromise be a sign of his relative stupidity or of his relative
cowardice it is all one: the two things, in their symptoms and effects,
are almost identical. In the first case he marries because he has
been clearly bowled over in a combat of wits; in the second he resigns
himself to marriage as the safest form of liaison. In both cases his
inherent sentimentality is the chief weapon in the hand of his opponent.
It makes him [caroche] the fiction of his enterprise, and even of his
daring, in the midst of the most crude and obvious operations against
him. It makes him accept as real the bold play-acting that women always
excel at, and at no time more than when stalking a man. It makes him,
above all, see a glamour of romance in a transaction which, even at its
best, contains almost as much gross trafficking, at bottom, as the sale
of a mule.

A man in full possession of the modest faculties that nature commonly
apportions to him is at least far enough above idiocy to realize that
marriage is a bargain in which he gets the worse of it, even when, in some
detail or other, he makes a visible gain. He never, I believe, wants
all that the thing offers and implies. He wants, at most, no more than
certain parts. He may desire, let us say, a housekeeper to protect his
goods and entertain his friends--but he may shrink from the thought
of sharing his bathtub with anyone, and home cooking may be downright
poisonous to him. He may yearn for a son to pray at his tomb--and yet
suffer acutely at the me reapproach of relatives-in-law. He may dream
of a beautiful and complaisant mistress, less exigent and mercurial than
any a bachelor may hope to discover--and stand aghast at admitting her
to his bank-book, his family-tree and his secret ambitions. He may want
company and not intimacy, or intimacy and not company. He may want a
cook and not a partner in his business, or a partner in his business
and not a cook. But in order to get the precise thing or things that he
wants, he has to take a lot of other things that he doesn't want--that
no sane man, in truth, could imaginably want--and it is to the
enterprise of forcing him into this almost Armenian bargain that the
woman of his "choice" addresses herself. Once the game is fairly set, she
searches out his weaknesses with the utmost delicacy and accuracy, and
plays upon the