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MARRIAGE AS A TRADE
49

knows what he wants; she, much more often than not, does not know anything of the kind. She is under the impression that she wants certain things which she has been told from her earliest childhood, and is being told all the time, are the things she ought to want. That is as far as she can go with certainty. This also can be said with certainty: that her first requirement, whether she knows it or not, is the liberty to discover what she really does require.

Once a man's character is known and understood it can usually be predicted with a fair degree of accuracy how he will act in any particular crisis or emergency—say, under stress of strong emotion or temptation. With his sister on the other hand you can never foresee at what point artificiality will break down and nature take command; which makes it infinitely more difficult, however well you know her, to predict her course of action under the same circumstances. The woman whose whole existence, from early dawn to dewy eve, is regulated by a standard of manners imposed upon her from without, by a standard of morals imposed upon her from without, whose ideals are purely arti-