ns the risk of losing the game while she is still only beginning to
learn it. To some extent that is quite inevitable if we are to insist
that a woman should bind herself to marry a man before she has experienced
the nature of the forces that marriage may unloose in her. A young girl
believes she possesses a certain character; she arranges her future in
accordance with that character; she marries. Then, in a considerable
proportion of cases (five out of six, according to the novelist Bourget),
within a year or even a week, she finds she was completely mistaken in
herself and in the man she has married; she discovers within her another
self, and that self detests the man to whom she is bound. That is a
possible fate against which only the woman who has already been aroused to
love is entitled to regard herself as fairly protected.

There is, however, a certain kind of protection which it is possible to
afford the bride, even without departing from our most conventional
conceptions of marriage. We can at least insist that she shall be
accurately informed as to the exact nature of her physical relations to
her future husband and be safeguarded from the shocks or the disillusions
which marriage might otherwise bring. Notwithstanding the decay of
prejudices, it is probable that even to-day the majority of women of the
so-called educated class marry with only the vaguest and most inaccurate
notions, picked up more or less clandestinely, concerning the nature of
the sexual relationships. So highly intelligent a woman as Madame Adam has
stated that she believed herself bound to marry a man who had kissed her
on the mouth, imagining that to be the supreme act of sexual union,[34]
and it has frequently happened that women have married sexually inverted
persons of their own sex, not always knowingly, but believing them to be
men, and never discovering their mistake; it is not long indeed since in
America three women were thus successively married to the same woman, none
of them apparently ever finding out the real sex of the "husband." "The
civilized girl," as Edward Carpenter remarks, "is led to the 'altar'
often in uttermost ignorance and misunderstanding of the sacrificial rites
about to be consummated." Certainly more rapes have been effected in
marriage than outside it.[35] The girl is full of vague and romantic faith
in the promises of love, often heightened by the ecstasies depicted in
sentimental novels from which every touc