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MARRIAGE AS A TRADE

would be likely to require of their wives an appearance of helpless fragility; and girls in that particular class were educated to be incapable of sustained bodily effort.

It is this fact—that their training was a training not in their own, but in some one else's requirements—which, to my thinking, makes women so infinitely more interesting to watch and to analyze than men. Interesting, I mean, in the sense of exciting. Practically every woman I know has two distinct natures: a real and an acquired; that which she has by right of birth and heritage, and that which she has been taught she ought to have—and often thinks that she has attained to. And it is quite impossible even for another woman, conscious of the same division of forces in herself, to forecast which of these two conflicting temperaments will come uppermost at a given moment.

The average man is a straightforward and simple-minded creature compared to the average woman, merely because he has been allowed to develop much more on his own natural lines. He has only one centre of gravity; the woman has two. To put it in plain English, he usually