fell in love.
'I wonder if you can tell me what it is about women that makes men
propose to them,' she said. 'I've known numbers of plain women married
and numbers of penniless ones, and some quite horrid ones without a
single quality likely to make a man happy, yet there must have been
_something_ about them that attracted--some reason for it.'

She went on to tell me in such a pathetic way how she longed to have a
home and a 'nice, kind man,' to care for her, and yet no man had ever
asked her; no man had ever desired her or looked on her with love; she
had never known the clasp of a man's passionate arms, nor the ecstasy of
a lover's kiss. It seemed very strange to me, strangely painful and
horribly humiliating. I could scarcely bear to look at her while she
told me these things.

'I would make a man so happy,' she said, and her mournful dark eyes
filled with tears; she had rather fine eyes, and was quite a
nice-looking woman with a most sweet and gentle manner. 'I would be so
good to him,' she went on; 'I'd simply live for him. I try to put it out
of my mind, but as I grow older, and it's more hopeless, I think of it
more and more and sometimes I feel I shall go mad with the misery of it.
The future is so utterly grey and it's all so unjust. I'm so fitted for
love, and now my life's going and I've had nothing, _nothing_!'

She wept bitterly and I wept too in sympathy with her. Curiously enough,
this woman was not only attractive, as I have said, and anxious to
please, and thoroughly feminine, but she had had ample opportunities of
meeting men. I suppose she lacked what the Scotch peasant-woman called
the '_come hither in the 'ee_'--some subtle sex-magnetism which had been
possessed by those 'plain, penniless, and horrid women' whom she talked
about. Or perhaps it was that the 'will to live' was absent and
therefore no mate came to the woman.

There are thousands of women who feel the same, though in most cases
they would scorn to own it. We hear a good deal of man's right to live;
what about woman's right to love? Women are so constituted that the need
for loving and being loved is the strongest factor of their being, the
essential of their existence. All over the country there are lonely
women of every class, leisured and working women, pretty and plain, good
and bad, who are hungering and thirsting for love, for a man to take
care of them, for the right to wifehood and the thrice blessed right to
motherhood. In