gard the
prevalent opinion that the heroine's mission is to become a wife before
the end of the third volume. The one ideal, accordingly, which romance
has to offer woman is marriage; and most novels thus make life end with
what really is only its threshold and beginning. The Bible no doubt says
that it is not good for man to live alone. What the Bible says of man,
public opinion as unhesitatingly asserts of woman; and a text that it is
not good for woman to live alone either, though not canonical, is
silently added by all domestic commentators to the Scriptural original.

Those who pretend to be best acquainted with the order of nature and the
mysterious designs of Providence assure us with confidence that all this
is as it should be; that woman is not meant to grow and flourish singly,
but to hang on man, and to depend on him, like the vine upon the elm. If
we remember right, M. Comte entertains opinions which really come to
pretty much the same thing. Woman is to be maintained in ease and luxury
by the rougher male animal, it being her duty in return to keep his
spiritual nature up to the mark, to quicken and to purify his
affections, to be a sort of drawing-room religion in the middle of
every-day life, to serve as an object of devotion to the religious
Comtist, and to lead him through love of herself up to the love of
humanity in the abstract.

One difficulty presented by this matrimonial view of woman's destiny is
to know what, under the present conditions in which society finds itself
placed, is to become of plain girls. Their mission is a subject which no
philosopher as yet has adequately handled. If marriage is the object of
all feminine endeavors and ambitions, it certainly seems rather hard
that Providence should have condemned plain girls to start in the race
at such an obvious disadvantage. Even under M. Comte's system, which
provides for almost everything, and which, in its far-sightedness and
thoughtfulness for our good, appears almost more benevolent than
Providence, it would seem as if hardly sufficient provision had been
made for them.

It must be difficult for any one except a really advanced Comtist to
give himself up to the worship of a thoroughly plain girl. Filial
instinct might enable us to worship her as a mother, but even the
noblest desire to serve humanity would scarcely be enough to keep a
husband or a lover up to his daily devotions in the case of a plain girl
with sandy hair and a freck