m with all her superior resources. He carries a handicap
from the start. His sentimental and unintelligent belief in theories
that she knows quite well are not true--e.g., the theory that she
shrinks from him, and is modestly appalled by the banal carnalities of
marriage itself--gives her a weapon against him which she drives home
with instinctive and compelling art. The moment she discerns this
sentimentality bubbling within him--that is, the moment his oafish
smirks and eye rollings signify that he has achieved the intellectual
disaster that is called falling in love--he is hers to do with as she
will. Save for acts of God, he is forthwith as good as married.

7. The Feminine Attitude

This sentimentality in marriage is seldom, if ever, observed in women.
For reasons that we shall examine later, they have much more to gain by
the business than men, and so they are prompted by their cooler sagacity
tenter upon it on the most favourable terms possible, and with the
minimum admixture of disarming emotion. Men almost invariably get
their mates by the process called falling in love; save among the
aristocracies of the North and Latin men, the marriage of convenience is
relatively rare; a hundred men marry "beneath" them to every woman who
perpetrates the same folly. And what is meant by this so-called falling
in love? What is meant by it is a procedure whereby a man accounts for
the fact of his marriage, after feminine initiative and generalship have
made it inevitable, by enshrouding it in a purple maze of romance--in
brief, by setting up the doctrine that an obviously self-possessed and
mammalian woman, engaged deliberately in the most important adventure of
her life, and with the keenest understanding of its utmost implications,
is a naive, tender, moony and almost disembodied creature, enchanted and
made perfect by a passion that has stolen upon her unawares, and which
she could not acknowledge, even to herself, without blushing to death.
By this preposterous doctrine, the defeat and enslavement of the man is
made glorious, and even gifted with a touch of flattering naughtiness.
The sheer horsepower of his wooing has assailed and overcome her maiden
modesty; she trembles in his arms; he has been granted a free franchise
to work his wicked will upon her. Thus do the ambulant images of God
cloak their shackles proudly, and divert the judicious with their
boastful shouts.

Women, it is almost needless to point