jority does not perceive the advance in morality which this
implies in comparison with the code of so many men who, without
responsibility--and without apparent risk--purchase the repose of their
senses. The free union of love, on the other hand, gives them an
enhancement of life which they consider that they gain without injuring
anyone. It answers to their idea of love's chastity, an idea which is
justly offended by the incompleteness of the period of engagement, with
all its losses in the freshness and frankness of emotion. When their
soul has found another soul, when the senses of both have met in a
common longing, then they consider that they have a right to full unity
of love, although compelled to secrecy, since the conditions of society
render early marriage impossible. They are thus freed from a wasteful
struggle which would give them neither peace nor inner purity, and which
would be doubly hard for them, since they have attained the
end--love--for the sake of which self-control would have been imposed."

It is almost impossible to quote any passage from "Love and Marriage"
which is not subject to further practical modification, or which does
not present an incomplete idea of which the complement may be found
somewhere else. Even this passage is one which states a brief for the
younger generation rather than the author's whole opinion. Still, with
all these limitations, her view is one which is so different from that
commonly held by women that it may seem merely fantastic to hold it up
as an example of the conservative instinct of women. Nevertheless, it is
so. It must be remembered that the view which holds that the chastity of
unmarried women is well purchased at the price of prostitution, is a
masculine view. It is a piece of the sinister and cruel idealism of the
male mind, divorced (as the male mind is so capable of being) from
realities. No woman would ever have created prostitution to preserve the
chastity of part of her sex; and the more familiar one becomes with the
specific character of the feminine mind, the more impossible does it
seem that women will, when they have come to think and act for
themselves, permanently maintain it. Nor will they--one is forced to
believe--hesitate long at the implications of that demolition.

No, I think that with the advent of women into a larger life our
jerry-built virtues will have to go, to make room for mansions and
gardens fit to be inhabited by the human soul