om of her experiential
penury. There would seem to be, indeed, but small respect among women
for virginity per se. They are against the woman who has got rid of
hers outside marriage, not because they think she has lost anything
intrinsically valuable, but because she has made a bad bargain, and one
that materially diminishes the sentimental respect for virtue held by
men, and hence one against the general advantage an dwell-being of the
sex. In other words, it is a guild resentment that they feel, not a
moral resentment. Women, in general, are not actively moral, nor,
for that matter, noticeably modest. Every man, indeed, who is in wide
practice among them is occasionally astounded and horrified to discover,
on some rainy afternoon, an almost complete absence of modesty in some
women of the highest respectability.

But of all things that a woman gains by marriage the most valuable is
economic security. Such security, of course, is seldom absolute, but
usually merely relative: the best provider among husbands may die
without enough life insurance, or run off with some preposterous light
of love, or become an invalid or insane, or step over the intangible
and wavering line which separates business success from a prison cell.
Again, a woman may be deceived: there are stray women who are credulous
and sentimental, and stray men who are cunning. Yet again, a woman
may make false deductions from evidence accurately before her, ineptly
guessing that the clerk she marries today will be the head of the firm
tomorrow, instead of merely the bookkeeper tomorrow. But on the whole it
must be plain that a woman, in marrying, usually obtains for herself
a reasonably secure position in that station of life to which she is
accustomed. She seeks a husband, not sentimentally, but realistically;
she always gives thought to the economic situation; she seldom takes
a chance if it is possible to avoid it. It is common for men to marry
women who bring nothing to the joint capital of marriage save good looks
and an appearance of vivacity; it is almost unheard of for women to
neglect more prosaic inquiries. Many a rich man, at least in America,
marries his typist or the governess of his sister's children and
is happy thereafter, but when a rare woman enters upon a comparable
marriage she is commonly set down as insane, and the disaster that
almost always ensues quickly confirms the diagnosis.

The economic and social advantage that women th