,
sooner or later, she will be faced with some such problems, and then her
beloved won't ask her if she be a flowering rose or invite her into his
garden of love unless she can find an answer which will carry them both
over to the next difficulty fairly successfully. But to live in an
eternal state of love-mush is what young people are brought up to regard
as matrimony. The plain facts of matrimony are carefully hidden from
them, as either being too "prosaic" or too indelicate. The most
responsible position in all life for a man and a woman is entered upon by
them with an ignorance and an irresponsibility which are neither
dignified nor likely to be satisfactory. A woman goes in for several
years' training before she can become a cook; a worker in every grade of
life has to go through a long period of initiation before she can be said
to be really fit for her "job." But any girl thinks she is fit to become
a wife, with no other qualification except that she is a woman, and can
return endearment for endearment when required. She is not expected to
know or do anything else. But her husband expects many and more
important things from her if he is not to live to regret his bargain. He
may not know it when he is asking her to live with him in his garden of
love, but he will realise it a few years later, especially if she has
turned that garden of love into a wilderness of expensive weeds.

_Wives_

The wife of a poor man really can be a helpmate, but the wife of a rich
man is so often only asked to be a mistress who can bear her husband
legitimate children. Everything which a woman can do, a rich woman pays
other women to do for her, while she graces the results of their labour
with a studied charm which receives its triumph in the envy of her
husband's male friends. No wonder there are so many wild and
discontented wives among the middle and upper classes. Where a man or a
woman has no "ideal," where they have nothing to do which is really worth
doing, they always approach the primitive in morals. We may pretend to
spurn the _cocotte_--but to look as nearly as she looks, to live as
nearly as she lives, to resemble her and yet to place that resemblance on
a legal and, consequently, secure foundation, is becoming more and more
the life-work of that feminine "scum" which the war stirred up and peace
has caused to overflow. Beneath it all I know there is a strata of the
Magnificent, but the surface-ground is