disability, as you say, was her personal dependence upon man
for her livelihood, and I can imagine no other mode of social
organization than that you have adopted, which would have set woman
free of man at the same time that it set men free of one another. I
suppose, by the way, that so entire a change in the position of women
cannot have taken place without affecting in marked ways the social
relations of the sexes. That will be a very interesting study for me."

"The change you will observe," said Dr. Leete, "will chiefly be, I
think, the entire frankness and unconstraint which now characterizes
those relations, as compared with the artificiality which seems to
have marked them in your time. The sexes now meet with the ease of
perfect equals, suitors to each other for nothing but love. In your
time the fact that women were dependent for support on men made the
woman in reality the one chiefly benefited by marriage. This fact, so
far as we can judge from contemporary records, appears to have been
coarsely enough recognized among the lower classes, while among the
more polished it was glossed over by a system of elaborate
conventionalities which aimed to carry the precisely opposite meaning,
namely, that the man was the party chiefly benefited. To keep up this
convention it was essential that he should always seem the suitor.
Nothing was therefore considered more shocking to the proprieties than
that a woman should betray a fondness for a man before he had
indicated a desire to marry her. Why, we actually have in our
libraries books, by authors of your day, written for no other purpose
than to discuss the question whether, under any conceivable
circumstances, a woman might, without discredit to her sex, reveal an
unsolicited love. All this seems exquisitely absurd to us, and yet we
know that, given your circumstances, the problem might have a serious
side. When for a woman to proffer her love to a man was in effect to
invite him to assume the burden of her support, it is easy to see that
pride and delicacy might well have checked the promptings of the
heart. When you go out into our society, Mr. West, you must be
prepared to be often cross-questioned on this point by our young
people, who are naturally much interested in this aspect of
old-fashioned manners".[5]

"And so the girls of the twentieth century tell their love."

"If they choose," replied Dr. Leete. "There is no more pretense of a
concealment of feeling on