ear of girls of good family who have asserted their "right to
motherhood" without marriage; and you hear of other girls who refuse
to marry because they will not make vows or accept conditions they
consider humiliating. These views do not attract large numbers;
probably never will. But they are sufficiently widespread to express
themselves in many modern essays, novels, and pamphlets, and even to
support several magazines. The women holding them are of various types
and quality, and are by no manner of means agreed with each other;
while those women who are working steadily and discreetly for the
progress of their sex condemn the extreme party, and consider them a
check on all real advancement.

The German girl, then, is not always the simple creature tradition
paints her. At any rate she reads novels and sees plays that would
have been forbidden to her mother. Nevertheless she is as a rule just
as happy as a girl should be when the man of her dreams asks her to
marry him. In other days a proposal of marriage was a ceremonial in
Germany. A man had to put on evening dress for the occasion, and carry
a bouquet with him. "Oh yes," said a German friend of mine, "this is
still done sometimes. A little while ago a cousin of mine in Mainz was
seen coming home in evening dress by broad daylight carrying his
bouquet. The poor fellow had been refused." But in these laxer times a
man is spared such an ordeal. It is more usual in Germany than in
England to speak to a girl's father before proposing to her, but even
this is not invariable nowadays. Young people make their own
opportunities. "Last year my brother proposed to his present wife in
the woods near Baden while they gathered Waldmeister," said a young
German to a girl he ardently admired. "It will be in flower next week,
and your parents have just arranged that I may meet them at the _Alte
Schloss_ in time for dinner. After dinner we will walk in the
woods--_nicht wahr_?" But the girl, as it happened, did not wish to
receive a proposal of marriage from this young man, so she took care
not to walk in the woods and gather Waldmeister with him. It is often
said that the sexes herd separately in Germany, and do not meet each
other much. But this always seems to me one of the things said by
people who have looked at Germans and not lived amongst them. A nation
that has such an intimate home life, and is on the whole poor,
receives its friends in an intimate informal way. Young me