ay, that so entire a change in the position of women cannot have taken
place without affecting in marked ways the social relations of the
sexes. That will be a very interesting study for me."

"The change you will observe," said Dr. Leete, "will chiefly be, I
think, the entire frankness and unconstraint which now characterizes
those relations, as compared with the artificiality which seems to have
marked them in your time. The sexes now meet with the ease of perfect
equals, suitors to each other for nothing but love. In your time the
fact that women were dependent for support on men made the woman in
reality the one chiefly benefited by marriage. This fact, so far as we
can judge from contemporary records, appears to have been coarsely
enough recognized among the lower classes, while among the more
polished it was glossed over by a system of elaborate conventionalities
which aimed to carry the precisely opposite meaning, namely, that the
man was the party chiefly benefited. To keep up this convention it was
essential that he should always seem the suitor. Nothing was therefore
considered more shocking to the proprieties than that a woman should
betray a fondness for a man before he had indicated a desire to marry
her. Why, we actually have in our libraries books, by authors of your
day, written for no other purpose than to discuss the question whether,
under any conceivable circumstances, a woman might, without discredit
to her sex, reveal an unsolicited love. All this seems exquisitely
absurd to us, and yet we know that, given your circumstances, the
problem might have a serious side. When for a woman to proffer her love
to a man was in effect to invite him to assume the burden of her
support, it is easy to see that pride and delicacy might well have
checked the promptings of the heart. When you go out into our society,
Mr. West, you must be prepared to be often cross-questioned on this
point by our young people, who are naturally much interested in this
aspect of old-fashioned manners."[1]

"And so the girls of the twentieth century tell their love."

"If they choose," replied Dr. Leete. "There is no more pretense of a
concealment of feeling on their part than on the part of their lovers.
Coquetry would be as much despised in a girl as in a man. Affected
coldness, which in your day rarely deceived a lover, would deceive him
wholly now, for no one thinks of practicing it."

"One result which must follow from the ind