Woman Who Did_, there have certainly been some changes. For one
thing, it is still harder apparently to earn a decent living. Times
are bad and money scarce; men are even more reluctant than before to
'domesticate the recording angel' by marrying, and a type of woman has
sprung up amongst us who is shy of matrimony and honestly reluctant to
risk its many perils for the sake of its problematical joys. Most
noticeable of all is the growing dissatisfaction of the sexes with each
other. Men do not shun marriage only because of unfavourable financial
conditions, or because the restrictions of wedlock are any more irksome
to them than formerly, but because they cannot find a wife sufficiently
near their ideal. Woman has progressed to such an extent within the
last generation or two: her outlook has so broadened, her intellect
so developed that she has strayed very far from man's ideal and,
consequently, man hesitates to marry her. There is something comic about
the situation, and at Olympian dinner-tables I feel sure the gods would
laugh at this twentieth-century conjugal deadlock.

Another reason why men fall in love so much less than they used to do is
largely due to the decay of the imaginative faculty. As for women,
although they are in the main as anxious to marry as ever, although it
is universally acknowledged that the modern young woman does cultivate
the modern young man unduly, their reasons for doing so are less and
less concerned with the time-honoured motives of love. Marriage brings
independence and a certain social importance; for these reasons women
desire it. H. B. Marriot Watson has put the case neatly thus: 'Women
desire to marry _a_ man; men to marry _the_ woman.' Nevertheless women
are even now more prone to fall in love than are men, because they have
better preserved this imaginative faculty, which is possibly also the
cause of the disillusionment and discontent of wives after marriage.

The upshot of it all is that men and women appear to have become
antagonistic to each other. However much they love the individual of
their fancy, a kind of veiled distrust seems to obtain between the sexes
collectively, but more especially on the part of men--perhaps because
man is more necessary to woman than woman is to man. This hostility
towards woman is particularly noticeable in the pages of the press.
Scarcely a week passes but some journalist of the nobler sex pours out
his scorn for the inferior one of his mo